There are various projects you can do for free, given the information in this book and open source components (or evaluation versions of Microsoft products) readily available on the Internet.
It is possible to do the open source implementations based on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or various Linux flavors. Use the platform you are most familiar with. The BSD variants have a powerful dual-stack packet filtering component called pf. This can be used to add a host-based firewall to any project (to block access via ...
