homelab

October 2026: Scaling Your Homelab to Kubernetes and Defense Against the Dark Arts

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October is officially here! With crisp fall air, leaves turning, and cybersecurity awareness month in full swing, it is the perfect time to level up your infrastructure and build something cool.

This month, we are diving deep into homelab architecture, automation, and modern orchestrators. Whether you are running a single mini-PC under your desk or a full server rack in the basement, this session will show you how to modernize your setup with enterprise-grade tooling.

The Details

  • Speaker: Aaron McPhall
  • Topic: The Modern Homelab: Scaling to Kubernetes Orchestration
  • Date: Thursday, October 8th
  • Time: 6:00 PM
  • Location: Virginia Western Community College (VWCC)

About the Talk

The Modern Homelab: Scaling to Kubernetes Orchestration

Whether you are running a single multi-purpose computer, managing multiple machines, or experimenting with hypervisors and containers, you can evolve your setup into a modern, production-grade platform. In this presentation, you will discover how to transition across every stage of the homelab maturity model by deploying a secure Kubernetes cluster built on modest, budget-friendly hardware using repurposed PCs.

Aaron will share how to build an immutable operating system foundation with Talos Linux and streamline system management through automated GitOps workflows using Gitea and ArgoCD. The session details real-world mitigations for infrastructure and security challenges, including strategies for handling resource constraints, automating update cycles, and safely executing workflows with robust telemetry and controls. Regardless of where you currently stand in your homelab journey, you will gain practical architecture patterns and actionable inspiration to take your infrastructure to the next level.

Meeting Details:

We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.

Meeting info:
Virginia Western Community College
Business/Science Building, Room M302
October 8th, 2026 @ 6PM
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ToJyoaMJ5BUy417QA

Upcoming Event: Defense Against the Dark Arts (Oct 29th)

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for another major event happening later this month! Defense Against the Dark Arts takes place on October 29th at VWCC.

This panel and live-demo event brings together local practitioners to break down modern cyber attack techniques and practical defenses for enterprise systems.

Bring a friend, grab a seat, and join us for an evening of homelab talk and community networking.

Mark your calendars for Thursday, October 8th at 6:00 PM at VWCC. See you all there!

January 15th: Building a SIEM & BSides Roanoke CFP!

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Happy New Year! We hope you had a fantastic holiday season.

We are kicking off 2026 with an incredible speaker and a topic that hits home for every security enthusiast: building your own security visibility from the ground up.

The Details

  • Speaker: Lizz Boice, Head of Cybersecurity Operations at GFiber
  • Topic: More Logs Please! Building a SIEM in Your Homelab
  • Date: Thursday, January 15th
  • Location: Virginia Western Community College (VWCC)

A Note on the Date: RISE typically meets on the second Thursday of the month. The first Thursday fell on New Year’s Day, we shifted our planning cycle back one week. We are meeting on the third Thursday (Jan 15th) for this month only to adjust for a post holiday recovery!

About the Talk

The best way to understand the tools of the trade is often to build them yourself. Whether you are looking to sharpen your detection engineering skills or just want to know what your home network is actually doing, there is no better teacher than a well-built homelab.

Lizz Boice will walk us through the journey of deploying a production-grade security stack right in your own home. Drawing on her experience in detection and automation at organizations like Zoox and Palo Alto Networks, Lizz will strip away the enterprise buzzwords to give you a clear, practical guide to log collection.

In this hands-on session, we’ll cover:

  • The “Why”: How SIEM helps Blue Teamers correlate logs and Red Teamers understand forensics.
  • The Build: A step-by-step guide to deploying the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Fleet) using Docker.
  • The Hurdles: Fixing real-world headaches like SSL certificates and “503 Service Unavailable” errors.
  • The Data: How to collect and search through data from your devices using Elastic agents.

Whether you are an aspiring SOC analyst, a seasoned Red Teamer, or a hobbyist who loves data, this talk will give you the blueprint to turn server logs into powerful security intelligence.

Meeting Details:
We will be meeting at Virginia Western Community College in the Hall Family Business/Science Building. Take the stairs to the left and go to the third floor and go to the CyberSecurity lab in room M302.​

Meeting info:
Virginia Western Community College
Business/Science Building, Room M302
January 15th, 2025 @ 6PM
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ToJyoaMJ5BUy417QA

Call for Presentations: BSides Roanoke 2026

It’s never too early to start planning for June! BSides Roanoke 2026 is happening on June 5th, 2026, and the CFP is officially open.

If you have a talk, a workshop, or a cool project you’ve been working on, we want to hear from you.

Submit your proposal here:https://forms.gle/XXXgp2fysP91v4oR9

We look forward to seeing you all at Virginia Western on the 15th!