Requirements and constraints¶

TryHackMe’s official documentation states:

Please submit only community challenge content (CTF) for public release, as walkthrough rooms are currently not being reviewed for public publishing. However, you are more than welcome to continue creating and experimenting with walkthrough rooms for personal use and share them privately with friends or colleagues.

Users get a VM and an objective. And, we can build our own workshop from that, with questions and reflection.

Constraints¶

Reality check¶

A few constraints deserve to be stated plainly, because they shape everything downstream:

• TryHackMe infrastructure is not built for ICS realism, it is built for disposable CTF boxes

• 0.5 to 1 GB RAM turns most “industrial simulations” into polite fiction

• Persistence is gone on reboot, so anything stateful needs to fake it convincingly

• Internet is off, so any dependency that quietly reaches GitHub will fail in a very unhelpful way

Translation: this is not a simulation of industry, it is theatre with just enough machinery to look convincing under dim lighting

Technical constraints¶

Critical resource warning¶

TryHackMe allocates only 0.5-1 GiB RAM and 1 CPU core to uploaded VMs. The full ics-simlab stack runs 16 containers and requires 4-8 GB RAM locally. Therefore:

• Do not attempt to run the full ics-simlab inside the TryHackMe VM

• Use power-and-light-sim (Python-based, lighter weight) or a heavily stripped-down version of ics-simlab

• Request a resource bump from TryHackMe support if the simplified environment still fails