In this assignment, you will be creating your forensics workstations for use throughout the semester and possibly beyond. To participate in online classes, you will need Microsoft Teams as required by Georgian College. To have your lab work marked, you will need to show your lab system screens to the professor, so you need to be able to see the lab system screen on the compuer where you will be running Teams. If you use a virtual machine running on your Teams computer for your lab system, you will be able to directly share that. If you use a physical machine other than your Teams computer, then you can use remote desktop (Microsoft RDP) to access your lab system and share the RDP session from your computer running Teams.
It is recommended to use VMWare for this course, but you can also use any other solution you wish for this including installing these environments on physical computers or using cloud-based VMs. It is the student’s responsibility to obtain, install, and become familiar with these virtualization programs and operating environments as necessary. You are expected to be competent with the command line in both Windows and Linux.
Some of the forensic tools we will be using only run in Windows, so you will be needing a Windows system to run them. You can use a physical or virtual machine. You will need Windows 10 or 11 on it, although it is not important which version of Windows 10 or 11 you use and it does not matter if it is activated with Microsoft or not. Your lab system must clearly identify itself as your own system. Do not use the default computer name, use something unique. Do not use only the Administrator account, create an ordinary user account using your own name for the account name. If the professor cannot clearly see that you are showing work on your own lab system, it will not be accepted for marking. If you use a physical machine other than your Teams computer, then you can use remote desktop (Microsoft RDP) to access your Windows lab system and share the RDP session from your computer running Teams.
Some of the forensic tools we will be using run only in Linux, so you will be needing a Linux system to run them. WSL may or may not work for this; it is not the recommended approach. You can use a physical or virtual machine. You will need a current version of Linux on it. If you use Kali, Caine, or another distro that is built for forensic work, you will have most of the tools already available to you. You will also have to download and install tools as needed during the semester. Your lab system must clearly identify itself as your own system. Do not use the default computer name, use something unique. Do not use only the root account, create an ordinary user account using your own name for the account name. If the professor cannot clearly see that you are showing work on your own lab system, it will not be accepted for marking. If you use a physical machine other than your Teams computer, then you can use remote desktop (VNC) to access your Linux lab system and share the VNC session from your computer running Teams.
When you have the 2 lab systems ready for use, you are done. There is nothing to submit for this lab. You will not be able to do the next labs in the course until you have these machines to work with.