~/projects/home-security-lab
Home security lab
A small home lab for hands-on defensive practice — early stage and in progress, with the build-out planned rather than finished.
in progress Jul 9, 2026 homelab blue-team detection
I’m building a small home lab to get hands-on defensive practice before I start the B.S. Cybersecurity program at UTSA this fall. Certifications and CTFs taught me the concepts; the lab is where I want to actually run the tooling — collect logs, write detections, and break things in an environment where breaking things is the point.
Planned build-out
This is the roadmap, not a list of things that exist yet:
- Virtualization host — a machine dedicated to running lab VMs, kept separate from anything I depend on day to day.
- Segmented lab network — the lab isolated from the rest of the home network, so experiments can’t touch real devices.
- Windows and Linux targets — a handful of endpoint VMs to generate realistic activity, monitor, and attack.
- Centralized log collection — endpoint and network logs forwarded to one place instead of scattered across machines.
- SIEM / detection experimentation — writing and testing detection rules against my own activity in the lab.
Current status
Early stage and in progress. I’m still working out hardware and software choices, so there’s nothing concrete to document yet — this page will grow as pieces actually land.