Networked Lab without GNS3

 GNS3 has come a long way since its early Dynamips beginnings.  There is no doubt it now offers a feature set that can make multivendor topology setups a reality with the integration of the GNS3 VM.  With the large feature set though there is still an incumbent learning path. If setup is not quite right you can often find yourself in a worm hole of troubleshooting, and online forums to fix niggles.

I recently setup a basic network topology outside of GNS3 just using the native capabilities in Virtual Box on a windows workstation. This does offer a good alternative if you just want to jump straight to a required lab.

Home lab containing Cisco CSRs, Checkpoint Firewalls in an HA pair, Windows VM and Kali Linux VM below.  These are all run and connected just using Virtual Box

This can be done by making full use of Virtual Box 'Host Network Manager'.  This is accessed from via the main menu File option in Virtual Box and selecting the host network manager feature.

Use the Create option to add multiple Host Only Ethernet Adapters. These will be auto assigned /24 networks, and added to you PC as virtual adapters.

At this point create the required VM machines in VBOX and join them to the required virtual network. Goto machine settings Network TAB. Use the Bridged network adapter to connect to your 'real world' home subnet

Your host machine will be able to reach any Host Only adapter networks, and hence logon to the VMs you have created e.g. via SSH.

A quick fix solution to running a networked VM lab, without spinning up GNS3.

AWS Security Model

AWS identifies a shared responsibility model for their cloud services.  AWS operates, manages and controls the cloud and is responsible for security of this infrastructure. AWS is also responsible for the security of the managed services e.g. OS database and patching, firewall config etc.  

Customers are responsible for everything they place into the Cloud: what to store, in which service, in what location, access rights to that data etc

As a generalisation AWS is responsible for ‘Security Of the Cloud’ whereas customers are responsible for ‘Security In the Cloud’.

The shared responsibility model changes dependent on what AWS service is used. E.g. for EC2 instances the Customer is responsible for any updates and security patches, however for a managed service such as Amazon RDS, Redshift AWS will handle patching.

https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-resources/