Setup

I have recently purchased an ACEMAGICIAN AM06PRO to use as a host for VMs as my Reverse engineering and Malware analysis small homelab. It comes with 16GB of ram and a Ryzen 7 5825U (8C, 16T) and 512GB of M.2 SSD to which I added a 1TB Sata SSD.

Installations

I immediately replaced Windows 11 with Ubuntu Desktop installed using ZFS for the main filesystem and formatted my Sata SSD, which will be used for VM disks, as btrfs. However a friend of mine who knows much more about VMs gave me some tips:

• nodatacow is needed for btrfs to not lose all the performance when using it as a VM disk destination
• Use bees to perform deduplication on btrfs

I also Installed tailscale and enabled RDP so that I can access it from my main PC and even when I’m not home!

VMs

REMnux

I converted the official .ova after installing REMnux from scratch twice and having issues with default packages.
After booting up the VM, internet wouldn’t work. Checking ip a I see the interfaces are not configured correctly so I checked the netplan config and found out the NIC name was wrong in the config file, changing that to my NAT default fixes the internet. After that I also added an extra NIC for a “host only” network and cofnigured it with a static IP.

FlareVM

For this I just installed Windows 10 on a VM and followed the instructions to install FlareVM. At the end I replaced the NIC network from NAT to the “host only” network I created and gave to REMnux too.