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This page is part of a larger series on building a cybersecurity lab using VMware Workstation Pro. Click here to be taken back to the project home page.
Download pfSense
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pfSense is acting as the NAT router and firewall for the lab environment. Therefore, pfSense will need to be the first VM to boot when running your lab. After pfSense boots, you can start your other VMs.
Whenever you are building a lab – whether in the cloud or on premise – you should always plan your network first. You should factor in future growth as well. It's much more difficult to change network design later than planning for it now.
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As of recently, Netgate is requiring users to create an account and provide personal information in order to download the pfSense CE ISO images, which I am not thrilled to see.
I understand that this is a mitigation strategy to combat piracy of their pfSense Plus software by third-party firewall appliance vendors (among other reasons).
I understand that this is a mitigation strategy to combat piracy of their pfSense Plus software by third-party firewall appliance vendors (among other reasons).
Download pfSense Community Edition
pfSense is a free and open source firewall and router that also features unified threat management, load balancing, multi WAN, and more
AMD64 ISO and click ADD TO CART
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Extracting the ISO Image
7-Zip
Download an archive file handler such as 7-Zip or simialr
.iso file will be stored in this folderEdit Network Settings
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My VMware host has multiple network interfaces and I find auto-bridging doesn't work that well. So, I'm going to define some bridged interfaces that I can manually select when I need to.
VMnet0 is statically bridged to my host's Ethernet NIC
Create the VM
.iso file according to the one you downloaded before
Optimizing Network Performance
In the VirtualBox counterpart to this guide, I advise readers to change the network adapter to virtio-net, a paravirtualized network adapter that enables higher network throughput to the pfSense VM, as opposed to emulating an Intel E1000 NIC.
& notepad.exe "$env:USERPROFILE\Documents\Virtual Machines\pfSense-CyberRange\pfSense-CyberRange.vmx"Run in PowerShell to edit the file
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Save your changes and close the text editor when finished.
Installing pfSense
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If you click inside the VM and can't get your mouse cursor back out of the VM, pressing
CTRL + ALT should release the mouse cursor.
em0 is the WAN interface
em1 is the LAN interface
Configuring pfSense
Assigning the Interfaces
Configuring the Interfaces
Configuring the LAN
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The LAN interface is going to serve DHCP clients, and does not get its IP address from a DHCP server elsewhere. Thus, we configure it statically.
y to enable the DHCP server
n, we want to keep using TLS on the web portal.
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All finished with the LAN configuration.
Configure the ISOLATED LAN
y to enable the DHCP server
n, we want to keep using TLS on the web portal.✅
All finished with the ISOLATED LAN configuration.
Configure the AD LAB LAN
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Pay careful attention to the DHCP settings just below ...
n to disable the DHCP server, as the domain controller will be acting as the DHCP server
n, we want to keep using TLS on the web portal.✅
All finished with the AD_LAB LAN configuration.
Final Check
A Note on Configuring the Firewall
In this guide, we will not be making the pfSense web console available from the WAN.
This is because you may be using a laptop and if you connect to public wireless, then your pfSense web console would be open to the others on that network.
Next Step
Importing Kali Using the Official VMware Image
In this module, we will look at the process of importing the pre-packaged Kali VM for VMware directly from the official source.
0xBEN
