Home Lab - Inexpensive Hardware Suggestions

[secraven]

I am trying to find some used inexpensive hardware for my home lab. I am looking for suggestions that are hopefully relatively efficient and doesn't create too much heat. I've been looking at used Lenovo Thinkcentre systems. I don't need long term traffic retention for my lab setup. A few days of analysis would be fine for my lab. Sorry if this is posted elsewhere, but I couldn't find any recent threads.

[reyesj2]

Inexpensive is subjective. Personally, I use an old gaming desktop to run proxmox for VMs. I have been recommended a Dell Precision T7810 Workstation for this purpose as well. Older tower system you can find for around $400

[secraven]

Thanks! $400 or less would be great. I had a Dell Tower previously but its was quite large and overkill. ESXi is no longer a free option unfortunately. An all in one systems with up to about a week of logs would be great.

[InfosecGoon]

I'm using that same Dell workstation for my Proxmox and it's been great - enough horsepower for home network infrastructure stuff (Security Onion, TrueNAS, Pi-hole) with plenty left over to spin up VMs to play with new tools.

[oneCrazyAdmin]

What do you use to get the data into Security Onion? Span port on a switch?

[secraven]

I have a network TAP - Dualcomm ETAP-2003 10/100/1000.

[oneCrazyAdmin]

Thanks! I will have to take a look