We spent a good chunk of late May 2025 building a short course on Nmap from scratch - 12 lectures, 12 companion labs, plus the entire virtual lab infrastructure the students would use to run the labs. The whole thing lives on our wiki under Nmap/Short Course.

This post is not about the Nmap material itself (that comes in the next post). It is about the design decisions behind the course - why 12 lectures, why a fully isolated cloud lab, why Vagrant + Docker + Ansible instead of picking one, and what we would do differently if we started over.

Course Shape …

This post is a preview of a series of posts to come, which will document the process of containerizing the entire charlesreid1.com website.

We will run through a lot of different moving parts and how to get them all working:

• Multiple domains and subdomains pointing to different services
• Docker pod for all services
• Nginx + SSL
• Reverse proxies via nginx
• Apache + MySQL + MediaWiki
• phpMyAdmin
• Gitea
• Configuration files under version control
• Data managed with backup/restore scripts and cron jobs
• Static content under version control
• Files server
• REST API
• Management LAN

All of the code for doing this is in docker …