___ # Tags #homelab #cybersecurity #blog ![[rtwhhwrthwrh.jpg]] It's already November in 2023 - holy crap, did time fly. I've gone through a few professional changes since the end of 2022 and into the end of 2023. I changed roles from a startup to a software development company and am now back at a large financial institution. I have a blog post lined-up about "When is a Good Time to Quit" as a topic, but that'll come later. I have spent a lot of time in 2023 being burnt out and not focused on the things I love about working in cybersecurity. However, none of that is meant as a dig to my employers; much of the work we do as professionals is fact-finding to see if we are a good fit for a particular role. This year, my home lab went through a refresher. I updated my hardware so nothing was piecemeal and everything was uniform. I am now running 3x Intel NUCs with 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVME drive each. I have Proxmox installed on all three with a cluster setup. I moved from my pfSense firewall to a Unifi Dream Machine Pro with Unifi Switch cementing my networking stack completely under Unifi. I lost some visibility on the logging front but gained much more insight on the network front. To make up for that I run a network span port to a Security Onion VM to pick up all of my NAT'd traffic. I wanted my homelab and network to be easier to administer while offering a single-pane-of-glass approach. Unifi as a platform is less comprehensive than my last lab setup, but it's much easier to maintain. Going into 2024, I will switch gears away from building infrastructure to learning skills using "appliances." What I mean is instead of creating a pentesting distro from scratch, I will use Kali. Instead of making a detection lab with all of the different components, I will run Security Onion, and instead of downloading and using tools ad-hoc to do forensics, I will install Flare, and so on. I want to focus on cybersecurity disciplines and methodologies and not just tools for the sake of tools.