PancakesCon 2 - Building a Home Lab and Hobby Farm"

### Overview In this PancakesCon presentation, Justin Henderson discusses two complementary pursuits: building an IT and security home lab and managing an animal-focused hobby farm. Drawing from roughly two decades in infosec, hiring experience across hundreds of applicants, and holding 61 certifications, Henderson addresses the misconceptions surrounding home labs, emphasizing their practical value for job hunting and skill demonstration over gear elitism. In the second half, he details the daily operational realities, costs, and personal benefits of running a 16.5-acre hobby farm with miniature animals.

### Key Topics - **Home Lab Misconceptions**: Debunking the idea that labs require high-end enterprise hardware, extensive budgets, or intense passion. Henderson challenges the criticism that asking about home labs is unfair gatekeeping, showing instead that lab experience demonstrates practical competence beyond academic degrees or certs. - **Hiring Realities & Practical Knowledge**: Why resumes packed with degrees and certifications often fall short during technical interviews when candidates struggle to explain how tools work in practice. Practical exposure—even in small increments—makes candidates stand out. - **Low-Cost Lab Tooling**: Setting up environments on existing laptops or repurposed hardware using free or low-cost virtualization and container tools. - **Recommended Lab Projects**: Practical defense and infrastructure projects to explore, including Active Directory, Windows Event Forwarding, Zeek/Suricata/Snort, Security Onion, PolarProxy, pfSense, and Pi-hole. - **Hobby Farm Operations & Economics**: Managing a variety of animals (miniature horses, miniature cows, donkeys, chickens, goats, dogs) with manageable daily time investments and reasonable recurring supply costs.

### Technical Details - **Virtualization & Hypervisors**: Labs can run directly on consumer laptops using VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, or Windows 10 Hyper-V. Dedicated bare-metal deployments can leverage Proxmox (including hyperconverged storage clustering across cheap desktops), while cloud platforms like AWS and Azure provide free starter credits. - **Containers & Applications**: Using Docker and Kubernetes to stand up Nginx web servers, databases, and web application firewalls. - **Network & Host Defense Projects**: - *Security Monitoring*: Deploying Security Onion for combined SIEM and NSM workflows. - *Traffic Analysis & SSL/TLS Decryption*: Using PolarProxy to intercept and decrypt TLS traffic to inspect HTTPS payloads in Wireshark or with Snort and Suricata. - *Infrastructure & Windows Auditing*: Standing up Active Directory Domain Services, configuring Windows Event Forwarding using guides like Palantir's WEF documentation, and managing PKI. - *Network Filtering*: Deploying pfSense (as a VM or on hardware) for application filtering and routing, and running Pi-hole for DNS sinkholing and ad-blocking on low-cost hardware like an $8 Raspberry Pi Zero W. - **Farm Logistics & Cost Breakdown**: Henderson manages 16.5 acres with no tractor or four-wheeler, utilizing a zero-turn mower and a used golf cart. Feed for multiple miniature horses, cows, donkeys, and goats relies on sweet grain ($8 per bag, lasting ~6 feedings / 3 days across two barns), totaling roughly $360–$400 per month including specialty feed. Hay (200–300 bales annually) is harvested from the property via a work-trade arrangement with a local farmer and loaded via a $50 auction tile conveyor belt. Daily chores require only 10–30 minutes of feeding twice per day.

### Takeaways Henderson advises learners to avoid burnout by building labs incrementally—investing a few hours a week rather than overwhelming 20-hour pushes. Dabbling across different domains (forensics, offense, defense, scripting) helps professionals pinpoint what they actually enjoy while building the exact practical familiarity employers look for. Similarly, outside of IT, pursuits like hobby farming offer grounding community and family benefits without requiring excessive daily labor when managed thoughtfully.