Lion Cipher Lab
Build your first complete home lab, end to end (foundations capstone)
- Foundations
- Advanced
- ~3–4 hours
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
You have done the tutorials — installed a VM, learned the terminal, built an isolated network, stood up Kali. Each one was a step; none of them, alone, is the thing the rest of this catalog assumes you have. Almost every hands-on lab in every track begins with an unspoken 'in your lab, spin up a box and…'. That lab is a real, specific place: a hypervisor, an isolated network no experiment can escape, an attacker machine, a target to practise on, clean snapshots to reset to, and — the part beginners skip and professionals never do — a written record so you can rebuild or explain it. This…
What you'll learn
- Assembling a hypervisor, an isolated network, and two VMs into one working lab
- Planning private (RFC 1918) IP addressing for an isolated network
- Verifying network isolation and reachability with an acceptance test
- Documenting a reusable lab (inventory, IP plan, network diagram, snapshot naming)
- A rollback-and-snapshot discipline you reuse for every future lab
Steps in this lab
- What you're building — the reusable environment, not another tutorial
- Take stock — confirm the pieces are in hand
- Plan the lab on paper first — the IP plan
- Build the isolated lab network
- Attacker VM: update it, then seal it onto labnet
- Target VM: install Ubuntu and put it on labnet
- Snapshot both machines — your clean baseline
- Acceptance test — prove it works AND prove it's sealed
- Write the build-book — the deliverable that makes it reusable
- The reuse discipline — how this lab serves every lab after it