Single Board Computers Part 3: Testing Lab

Virtual Lab Environment

We are currently setting up the testing environment for our single board computers project. We are using a VMware ESXi server with plenty of power and space to host the virtualized network environment. Using virtual machines will allow us to create a fully functional network that is isolated from our main network. By separating the two, we do not have to do testing on a live network.

With the configuration of our VM, we can quickly change the network layout and configuration at any time. This allows us to test many different aspects of the project, depending on our current situation. Additionally, we can break our network and then restore our machines at any point using snapshots.

The current network layout we are building consists of a web server, DNS server, mail server and several clients.  All of the services are running on Ubuntu server12.04. There are also two Linux clients as well as one Windows client. On the web server, we are running a WordPress page that is supported by Apache, PHP, and a MySQL database. Our next step is setting up the mail server.

Along with the previously mentioned virtual machines, we are also setting up a machine with a clonezilla server. Our plan is to do weekly backups of the ODROIDs and their current working status. Backups will be pushed from the device to the server running clonezilla.

Once the network is fully setup, our goal is to simulate live traffic.  We want to simulate a network that has real users interacting with it, so the ODROIDs will have network traffic to work with, whether it is HTTP, FTP, DNS or an active TSL sessions.

Go here to read Part 2 of Single Board Computers

http://computerforensicsblog.champlain.edu/2014/02/04/single-board-computers-part-2/

-Grant Kaiser

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