Lab 01 ‐ Environment Setup - aaralik1/SYS-255 GitHub Wiki

In our first lab called "Environment Setup" we prepared two of our virtual machines which were the firewall vm 1 and workstation 1. We had to set up two network adapters for our firewall which we will then connect it to the WAN and LAN. After completing that step, we moved onto setting up our firewall ready and for this we used options "1 - Assign Interfaces" and option "2 - Set interface(s) IP address)". Next, I had to play around with option 2, several times because at first I typed the wrong IP address for the WAN, I typed 10.0.17.2 (which is the upstream gateway IP address) while it should have been 10.0.17.107. So, later on, I changed that before it caused any major problems.

Upon the completion of assigning IP addresses and setting up interfaces, I went to the workstation and went in changing my workstation name. However, I accidently changed the computer description instead of the computer name. I later realized this when I couldn't find the computer name option in the location and under the administrators category. So I had to go back and change it which worked this time! You can always double check by typing the commands "whoami" or "hostname"

Later this lab, I had to manually change the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, and the preferred DNS server of the workstation. Personally, I liked manually changing IPv4 settings. Moving on, I needed to use the IP address I set up which was 10.0.5.2 to access the Pfsense website. However, even though I tried several times, I simply couldn't. So I pinged outside networks like 8.8.8.8 but the destination host was unreachable. Eventually, what I needed to was to identify the probable causes of this. So I started brainstorming some options with the help of my professor. After that, I went over option 2 again a couple times and it seemed that it wasn't the cause of the problem. Then, I tried typing the URL to make sure I didn't type it wrong when I first tried "https://10.0.5.2" but whenever I hit enter, the site wouldn't open up. After checking off the many probable causes of this problem, I tried one last thing which was going into vsphere and checking the editing settings. In the editing settings, I noticed that the workstation's network adapter was selected as the WAN instead of the LAN. However, I needed it to be on LAN because 10.0.5.2 is connected to LAN. So, after I changed the network adapter to LAN, I went back and I was able to ping 8.8.8.8 without any problems. I also was able to access the Pfsense website properly and sign in with the given credentials.

In conclusion, this lab was a great exercise to set up virtual machines on our own and actually get to play around with the firewall in depth. This lab also pushed me to troubleshoot in various things whether or not if they were easy or hard problems. I learned so many new things from this lab and would like to implement them in my cybersecurity career.