Hello, I am new to the forum and pretty much new to the security field. My plan is to set up a home security lab. I have searched goggle for some articles but I have come up a bit short and I was hoping to get some insight on how I would go about setting up my lab.

At the present time I have these machines available for use in my lab:

P3 850, 256ram, 40gig (dual boot red hat, 2k) laptop.
Athlon 2600, 1gig ram, 80gig hd (no OS atm just built).
Celeron 266, 48ram (shopping on eBay to upgrade to at least 196).

Also shopping for a hub on eBay atm and cables and what not.

I will probably get another pc or two to add on. (One more for sure). My main goal is to learn as much as possible pertaining to security and this lab would serve as a hand on learning experience.

I plan to use these OS's:

Win2000
Linux redhat, mandrake, slackware
smoothwall as my firewall (running hopefully on the Celeron)

Is there any tips you guys might give me like what other equipment I need or should look into? Or maybe another OS to try. I am not to familiar about networking but I am reading a lot and plan to get a decent background before I undertake this project. I will be mainly hacking and securing my network.

If you guys and gals 8) have any suggestions it would really help me out.