Module 0: Orientation

Somewhere out there is a junior admin sweating through their first week because a hiring manager assumed "knows computers" meant "has seen Group Policy before." I built this course for that person, a few years earlier.

By the end of the full curriculum you will have built a small mock enterprise on your own hardware: Active Directory, a real certificate authority, single sign-on, Docker services, Ansible automation, and a SIEM watching all of it. Then you'll attack it from Kali and investigate your own alerts. Every piece of software involved is free. The price is your time.

This module needs no hardware and no installs. It's a sit-down-and-read module, and it exists because starting a lab without orientation is how people end up with four half-built VMs and no idea why any of them matter.

What's in it:

• 0.1 what an enterprise environment looks like from the inside
• 0.2 the people who run it, and which of their chairs you'll sit in
• 0.3 the lab you're going to build, and what hardware it honestly needs
• 0.4 how this course works: numbering, checkpoints, journals, AI
• 0.5 your first journal entry
• 0.6 the checkpoint: measure your machine and pick your tier

One evening is enough. Don't skip 0.6; every later module assumes you did it.