Home Lab

All those little labs on your own box are good, but the next step after attaining enough technical knowledge to be dangerous is to build a home lab. Once there are multiple computers you own in the mix throwing packets at eachother, the amount you can learn rapidly scales up.

A home lab doesn’t mean you need server racks, just at least a computer that can run 2+ VMs at a time. This is the best resource on the topic by a significant margin: Building Virtual Machine Labs: A Hands-on Guide (Second Edition) . The author is absolutely awesome and is a supporter of this site.

It is pay what you want, so pay what you want, and then set up everything that seems interesting, focusing on the security products. In this book you will set up a full network, along with Kali and Metasploitable. What is important is that you will learn how to use Metasploit, but only so that you can create good logs for your security monitoring setup.

As I mentioned, I just want you looking at packets.