Today I hit a wall.

The plan was simple: boot the VMs, follow the tutorial, and bring AD Lab 1.0 online. But everything broke the second I tried to follow it. The VirtualBox UI was different. Ubuntu’s netplan config had changed. The internet was dead. The commands shown in the video? Outdated or outright missing.

This tutorial is only a year old — and parts of it are already unusable.

I checked the comments:

• “Thanks! Worked first try.”
• “Super helpful!”
• “Got it up and running in no time!”

And I couldn’t help but wonder…
Did these people actually build the lab, or just watch the video and click ‘like’?

Because what I went through wasn’t that.

The Real Breakpoint

The tutorial designs the lab as a fully isolated network — no internet access by default.

Great for realism. Terrible for practicality.

If you don’t plan ahead to allow temporary external access:

• You can’t download updates
• You can’t install tools (like Splunk Forwarder)
• And when you finally realize it… it’s too late to patch anything
• You’re rebuilding the entire VM from scratch

And that’s exactly what happened.

How I Fought Back

Instead of quitting, I did what any tired but stubborn cyber student would do:

I invoked the power of ChatGPT.

I dumped YAML files into it. I asked it to explain deprecated syntax. I walked through network configs line by line — and it helped me keep going when nothing made sense.

Then, after everything was “correct” —

I stared at a broken CLI output for over an hour.

The config looked fine. The commands were clean. The logic checked out.
And then… I saw it:

I had misspelled the interface name.
Twice.

That’s what learning in this field looks like sometimes: debugging typos while barely awake at 2AM.

What I Actually Did

• Rebuilt the entire lab from scratch
• Modified VirtualBox to use a NAT adapter alongside internal ones
• Verified connectivity for updates before isolating the network
• Used ChatGPT to troubleshoot netplan and CLI errors
• Documented every config change that diverged from the video

What I Learned

You can’t treat tutorials like gospel.
You have to understand the logic.
You have to break things, fix them, break them again, and document the chaos.

And most of all:

Hackers don’t sleep. And neither do students who want to catch up.

Written by Steven Loucks — cybersecurity student, veteran, and lab builder