**Deployed GOAD-Light on VirtualBox (Ubuntu 24.04) - sharing my guide with the real errors I hit**
For those who don't know it, GOAD (Game of Active Directory) is an open-source project by Orange Cyberdefense that provisions a fully functional but intentionally vulnerable AD environment: multiple domains, trust relationships, misconfigured delegations, weak ACLs, and more. It's essentially a legal, controlled playground for practicing AD attack chains (Kerberoasting, Pass-the-Hash, DCSync, lateral movement...) and building detection coverage against them.
GOAD-Light is the lightweight version: 3 VMs (DC01, DC02, SRV02) across two domains with a bidirectional trust, running on Windows Server 2016. Manageable on a decent laptop.
I deployed it on VirtualBox + Ubuntu 24.04 and figured I'd document the process properly since the official docs, while solid, can be a bit overwhelming when you're hitting errors at 1am.
The guide covers the full deployment with Ansible, but more importantly it documents the actual errors I ran into:
- `NS_ERROR_FAILURE` on Vagrant launch (vboxusers group not reloaded after install)
- `couldn't resolve module ansible.windows` (Ansible Galaxy dependency and how to bypass it entirely)
- `unreachable=1` on DC01 mid-provisioning (DC rebooting after domain promotion, not a real error, just needs patience)
- VM conflicts from previous installs and how to clean them up cleanly
Posted Apr 5, 2026, 10:26 AM UTC