Network Monitoring at Home for Fun and Profit (Part I)

Who says you can't have professional, enterprise-grade network monitoring capabilities over your home or small office network for less than $100 worth of commodity off-the-shelf hardware? Not me! Often times, the surest way to get something difficult accomplished is to try to convince me that it can't be done. Impossible you say? That's crazy talk.

Recently I left a position that had afforded me the opportunity to play around with all kinds of fancy, expensive toys - the kind you might see sporting flashy logos with big names like Cisco and Gigamon and NetOptics. It wasn't very long after parting ways with my beloved magical boxes of networking tricks before I started getting that itch to tinker. Bad. I wanted my lab back, dammit.

Sadly, the balance in my checking account didn't have quite enough zeros in it to cover that shiny new chrome-plated dual-exhaust hot-rod Director I'd been lusting after. You could say I had champagne tastes on a beer budget.

Sure, I could have gotten by with an old-and-busted Catalyst 3560 from eBay for a few hundred bucks (perhaps using some VLAN Mapping ACL tricks), but where's the fun in that? And then I'd have to wait 6-8 weeks on international parcel post shipping from Elbonia, crossing my fingers the whole time that the thing actually powers on when it arrives... what if I could just build something out of stuff I had lying around?

When I was in boy scouts, we used to joke about the 13th point of the (12-point) Scout Law being "a Scout is resourceful" for a reason. It was time to grab those "bricked" Linksys routers out of the basement and put them to good use.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Project High Life: The champagne of cheap routers.

I'm hoping to have the full writeup completed Real Soon Now, with more pretty diagrams to follow shortly, thanks to my buddy Sean Brennan. He was able to put this one together for me after a lot of squinting really hard at my chicken scratch hand-drawn originals. Graphic design is not my forte ;-)

Stay tuned for more technical implementation details. Project High Life is coming soon to a network near you. If you're still thirsty, check out the teaser at WRT-SPAN on GitHub.