Blue Man Group is the codename for the Blue Team infrastructure component of ISTS17.

Please note that deployment was performed one team at a time, instead of deploying against all teams at once. The rest of this guide will assume that you are also deploying against one team at a time. However, deploying against all teams at the same time should not be difficult.

For ISTS 17, we deployed 14 teams in total - teams 1-13 were for competitiors, and team 0 was an unused team for testing deployment and red team activities. This guide will use team 0 as the example deployment team.

Before you can use this repository to deploy any teams, you will need to create templates for each host in the host reference tables below. Each template's hostname should be configured with the hostname listed in the tables below. In addition, all templates must be accessible via Ansible. Make sure to configure the files in group_vars properly.

Lastly, the network you use to deploy must have Windows DHCP and DNS set up. Windows is specifically required because of the interaction between the DHCP and DNS services. DHCP must be configured (in addition to typical options) to send a domain name and update DNS records for clients. This will be used for initial connectivity before hosts are assigned static IP addresses.

Once a team's VMs are cloned out, they should get DHCP leases and the Windows DHCP/DNS server should create DNS records for their temporary IP addresses. Before doing anything else, ensure that the entire team is reachable using Ansible. You can use the following commands to do so:

ansible team0 -i inventory.yml -m ping -l linux         # Linux host testing
ansible team0 -i inventory.yml -m ping -l bsd           # BSD host testing
ansible team0 -i inventory.yml -m win_ping -l windows   # Windows host testing

Attila may have some issues getting DHCP because interfaces do not always get consistent names. If it does not get DHCP, you will have to log in manually and fix the interface script. See the distribution documentation for further details on configuring networking on Cucumber Linux. Also, you may have to configure the static IP addresses for Attila manually due to the above issue with interface naming.

Next, generate the machines variable block in group_vars/all.yml using the generateMachines.sh script. Make sure to double-check that the script is setting the correct IP addresses for your environment. At the time this document was written, the script is configured to use the IP addresses shown in the host reference tables below. After removing the old machines and hostnames variables, you can use the following command to generate the variable block:

./generateMachines.sh >> group_vars/all.yml

Once Ansible connectivity is verified, run the static-ips.yml playbook on the team to configure the static IP addresses. You can use the following command to do so:

ansible-playbook static-ips.yml -i inventory.yml -l team0

Once the playbook is complete, delete the old A and PTR records in the blue team DNS zones and replace them with records that point to the newly-set static IP addresses. Finally, restart all of the team's boxes so the networking changes take affect. A hard reset is acceptable.

Once the team's VMs are back up, verify Ansible connectivity using the ad-hoc Ansible commands shown above. You may have to flush the DNS cache on the Ansible deployment host in order to properly resolve the newly-created DNS records. After connectivity has been verified, take a "Pre-deployment" snapshot of the VM in vCenter without including memory.

Now that static IP addresses are set and the hosts can be connected to, you should be able to start deployment. This is as simple as running the following command:

ansible-playbook deploy.yml -i inventory.yml -l team0

Please note that the playbook will fail the first time you run it once it starts trying to add domain users. This is because the domain controller has not finished restarting. Our Ansible doesn't do a good job at waiting for the domain controller to configure itself, so you'll just have to watch the console to wait for Alexander to reboot. Once it's rebooted, just re-run the playbook with the same command as listed above.

Once the playbook is finished, you should verify that all the services are functioning properly. We didn't do any molecule tests or any sort of CI for the Ansible this year (I'm a sad boi about it). The recommended way for testing is to set up the scoring engine for all teams you will deploy. Once a service is passing checks, you should be good to go with it.

After a host is passing all of it's service checks, delete the "Pre-deployment" snapshot and consolidate the disks. Then, take a "Post-deployment" snapshot, once again without including memory. You are now ready to deploy the next team!

Notes about "global" services:

• WinRM on all Windows hosts using local accounts
• SSH on all Linux/Unix hosts using local accounts

Blueteam-managed network
Console access provided
Network: 10.2.X.0/24
Gateway: 10.2.X.254
Domain: teamX.ists.io

Blueteam-managed network
No console access provided
Network: 10.3.X.0/24
Gateway: 10.3.X.254
Domain: teamX.cybertigers.club