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About

Beadli Lab Academy is a free course that teaches enterprise infrastructure and security by having you build one. Not read about one, and not click through somebody else's pre-broken environment: eighteen modules that start with an empty computer and end with a segmented, monitored, documented lab that you then attack yourself.

It costs nothing, it has no ads, and it never asks you to buy hardware.

Why it exists​

Most people arrive at their first IT or security job having never seen a domain controller. They have certifications, or a degree, or a stack of video courses, and no experience of a system that has to keep working.

The gap isn't knowledge. It's that nobody let them build anything.

Meanwhile the material that does exist splits badly. Attack-focused labs ship a broken Active Directory to practise against, teaching nothing about how it was built or defended. Build-focused guides stop the moment the service starts, leaving out monitoring, backups, certificates and every other thing that decides whether it survives contact with reality.

This course does the whole arc, on one machine, in one environment that grows: hypervisor, directory, PKI, single sign-on, Linux, containers, automation, monitoring, then offensive testing against what you built, then GRC, assessing it for compliance the way an auditor would.

Who makes it​

Beadli Lab Academy is written by one person who runs the lab it's modelled on.

That matters more than a biography would. The architecture in these modules is a scaled-down version of an environment that actually runs: the same directory design, the same certificate authority arrangement, the same monitoring and detection stack. When a module explains why something is done a particular way, the reason is usually that the other way caused a problem once.

The war stories in the course are real and sanitised. No production addresses, hostnames or customer detail appears anywhere, and the student lab deliberately uses a different domain name so nothing you build can collide with anything real.

How to use it​

Start at Module 0. It takes an evening, needs no software, and it's where the tier system is explained so you can work out which parts your machine can run.

You need a computer you already own with 16 GB of memory. That covers most of the course. Two later stretches want more, and every module says at the top which tier it needs, so you'll never be surprised halfway through.

If you want to build physical hardware eventually, there's a whole CyberRack section for that. It is not required for any part of the course.

Using the material yourself​

The course text is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. You can copy it, adapt it and teach from it, provided you credit Beadli Lab Academy, don't sell it, and share your version under the same terms. The scripts and code are MIT, which means you can use those however you like, including commercially.

Teachers and training providers: the non-commercial clause is about selling the material, not about using it in a classroom. If you want to run this course with students, that's exactly what it's for.

Getting in touch​

If something in a lesson doesn't work, that's worth telling me. The course is verified by one person on one set of hardware, and the failures that matter most are the ones that only appear on somebody else's.