Project Log

Welcome to the OPFORGE blog — a series of posts documenting the evolution of the lab, one Check–Do–Check at a time.

From 404 to Flawless: How OPFORGE Finally Deployed

Blog Post: “From 404 to Flawless: How OPFORGE Finally Deployed” TL;DR After wrestling with GitHub Pages, Hugo themes, broken submodules, and outdated Hugo versions, OPFORGE.dev is now live — built with Hugo + PaperMod and deployed through GitHub Actions. Here’s how we pulled it off, step-by-step. 🛠️ Background Project: OPFORGE — a portfolio-driven site documenting the creation of a cyber detection engineering and threat emulation lab. Goal: Use Hugo + PaperMod + GitHub Pages to create a professional and performant static site for hosting blog-style documentation. ...

Kibana Data View Setup

Set up a Kibana data view in SOF-ELK to visualize Winlogbeat event data and enable efficient threat hunting in OPFORGE.

From Host to Hive: Transferring Logs with PowerShell + SCP

This post describes how to automate the conversion and transfer of Winlogbeat logs from opf-mbr01 to opf-log01 using PowerShell and SCP.

Precision Logging: Exporting Winlogbeat Data from OPFORGE

We configure Winlogbeat on opf-mbr01 to export JSON-formatted logs to disk. This allows enriched post-processing before ingesting into SOF-ELK.

Ingest to Analyze: Bringing SOF-ELK Online

This post walks through the deployment and configuration of opf-log01, the centralized logging VM for OPFORGE, powered by SOF-ELK. From network setup to confirming ELK stack services, this guide ensures a solid foundation for ingesting security-relevant data.

Building the OPFORGE Website

This post documents the process of building the official website for OPFORGE, a cybersecurity lab project focused on detection engineering, threat emulation, and explainable AI. 🔧 Tooling Stack Hugo – Static site generator (v0.147.1) PaperMod – Lightweight, responsive Hugo theme GitHub Pages – CI/CD-backed static hosting Cloudflare DNS – Domain and HTTPS management Custom Domain – https://opforge.dev 🧱 Build Process Created site: hugo new site opforge-site --format yaml Installed theme: git submodule add https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git themes/PaperMod Configured hugo.yaml with menus, theme, and metadata ...

Forging the Core: Building OPFORGE's Domain Controller

In this post, we configure OPFORGE’s foundational infrastructure by building the domain controller opf-dc01. We’ll define our network structure, stand up Active Directory, and prepare the environment for workstation and log server integration.

OPFORGE Overview

Introducing the OPFORGE project—a purpose-built cyber operations lab focused on threat emulation, detection engineering, and explainable AI.