A while back I registered privlab.xyz for of my projects. A side job of this project is publicly sharing privlab.xyz to everybody learning and playing with IT, by having a public private DNS setup Here are the details on what it does.

One challenge when learning things is that a top down approach is usually hard to follow, as a lot of low level setup is required to have everything available. In return, when learning bottom up, one easily gets stuck on details. One of these small things is enjoying DNS. While having DNS from the start would be awesome, it takes a little to get there. My approach for trainings is to provide a running DNS server and hand out a table with names and IP addresses. The students then get to setup services, use DNS from the start and then shift things over to their own DNS server when they get there. This allows them to make sure their services work, have the correct names configured and only then add the next variable. Doing something similar in a home lab is a little bit more challenging, unless you send somebody a pre-configured VM or a box / device or use privlab.xyz.

DNS Entry

The DNS entries for privlab.xyz are named after typical tools and directly point at private IP addresses. As such, when giving a host the applicable name, any system will be able to resolve the correct IP address and then access the system. The entries offer options in 192.168.253/24, 172.30.253.0/24 and 10.10.253.0/24.

Additionally the *.int192.privlab.xyz is resolved by ns192.privlab.xyz, which in return points to 192.168.252.101.

The full set of entries can be found on https://security-bits.de/privlabdns and on https://privlab.xyz .

And Now?

Have fun actually having DNS in your next simple lab setup.