Lab Writeups
Professional technical writeups from the homelab — each covers the objective, architecture, what I configured, evidence, key findings, skills demonstrated, and what I'd improve next. Built to production habits: documented, reproducible, and honest about the rough edges.
Building a Home SIEM: Pi-hole → Splunk DNS Log Pipeline
Shipping every DNS query on my network into Splunk over syslog, extracting fields with regex, and building a DNS telemetry dashboard — blocked vs. allowed activity, top domains, and per-client query patterns.
Proxmox VE Homelab Build: One Box, a Whole Security Stack
Turning a $150 Dell OptiPlex 7070 SFF into a virtualization host running the whole detection stack — Pi-hole in a lightweight LXC container, Splunk Enterprise in a full VM, with headroom for what’s next.
Flashing OpenWrt on a Netgear R6220 — via Telnet, When the Web UI Says No
Netgear’s stock firmware blocked the normal OpenWrt install path, so I flashed it the hard way: unlocking the hidden Telnet console and writing the squashfs kernel and rootfs images directly to the flash partitions with mtd_write.
Secure Remote Access: Tailscale Subnet Routing + Cloudflare Zero Trust
Two complementary paths into the lab with zero inbound ports: a WireGuard-based Tailscale overlay that routes the whole lab subnet, and Cloudflare Tunnel + Access for identity-verified, browser-only access to individual dashboards.
Phishing Email Prediction Using AI — Cybersecurity Capstone
My Lewis University capstone: an end-to-end phishing analysis system that parses raw emails, enriches them with VirusTotal threat intelligence, and applies LLM-based contextual risk scoring — with analyst-readable justifications in a Streamlit SOC dashboard.