Help setting up small at home lab

[Ugenix]

Hello All,

I am brand spanking new to this site. I am a noob, but hopeing to change that. I have been doing some research all over the net on Back Track 5 and pentesting in general.
The reason for this is because I am going back to school starting January. I will be taking Computer Security and Investigations. I want to get a bit of a general idea of concepts, terminology and to just do some experimenting. I am in no way a Linux expert but I do have, what I consider to be a good foundation.

I have an old P4 desktop with 1gb of ram, an old toshiba satellite pentium centrino running 500mb of ram both running windows XP. I also have a newer HP laptop AMD athalon PII 340 dual core with 4gb of ram running Ubuntu. I have been reading about using VMplayer and running everything I need to start a pentest lab on one pc, but since I have this oldie but goodie equipment sitting around, I would like to setup a physical network instead of going virtual.

I have downloaded backtrack 5r3, and also the de-ice pentest cd 1. I would be very grateful and appreciative if I could get some feedback from you experienced members, and some guidance on setting up a pentest lab.

Thank you!!

[d4Rk5T4r]

Assuming you're already knowledgeable about configuring a physical network (wireless or otherwise), may I suggest you take a look at http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forum...ad.php?t=34939 as a possible course of action in order to achieve what you're hoping to do?

Good luck!