TaoSecurity Lab

In a recent blog comment one of you asked about TaoSecurity lab. This is a collection of my own gear -- nothing associated with my corporate employer. I decided to post the diagram at left in case someone found it useful.

To summarize the color scheme: 1) blue (and the blue squiggle) means "wireless access," regardless of the nature of the device (phone, appliance, laptop, etc.); 2) green means Cisco; 3) gray means "appliance"; 4) peach (?) means server; and 5) orange means no IP address (e.g., two dumb taps). The two small purple arrows represent lines running to a sensor for monitoring purposes.

As you can see, there are two main segments. The blue devices all connect via wireless to the main network. You could consider the blue devices (and the supported WAP, iTap, and gateway) to be "production." The other devices are all wired, and they are more for "research." In other words, if the Cisco 2651xm router or anything else connected to it dies, no one but me will likely care!

A few aspects of this lab stand out to me:

• The number of wired devices is roughly equal to the number of wireless devices. A few years ago I had a couple dozen white box systems that took nearly all the shelf space in my wire racks. Now wireless devices generate most of the interesting traffic.


• I've replaced most hardware systems with virtual systems. The 2950iii is an ESXi server with 10 NICs. With so many NICs I can simulate systems on multiple VLANs on real hardware switches.


• I like having three Cisco switches and a router. They aren't really necessary but a real layer 3 switch plus two real layer 2 switches is fun for working with IOS.


• I need a real computer rack. All the rackmount gear is sitting on wire shelving. I'd rather not show any photos until it looks more professional!

So there it is. I didn't show a few more systems which I consider retired, or at least "shut down unless I really need them." For example, I have a PPC Mac Mini and a HP Visualize PA-RISC, plus two Shuttle SFFs and a portable Hacom device. Right now I can't think of a reason to keep them running since I can always spin up a new VM if I need to test anything.
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