Daemonlogger native package now in OpenWRT trunk!

Success! My patch for building Daemonlogger as a native OpenWRT package has been accepted into the mainline distribution and committed to trunk. Pre-built binary packages are now available for all supported architectures in the nightly snapshots tree. You'll find the appropriate .ipk for Kenny (a WRT150N) and similar Broadcom-based routers here.

Unfortunately these packages only work on the latest trunk firmware builds at the moment, and the 3.2 kernel along with the extra software included in these builds does not leave enough free JFFS space or usable RAM to run daemonlogger effectively. I'm trying to convince the developers to include this in the next stable release (Backfire 10.03.2) based on the 2.6 kernel, but no luck yet.

For the time being you can still grab my binary packages here from my GitHub repository. These *do* install and run cleanly on the current stable version (Backfire 10.03.1). For most Broadcom-based WRT-type devices, you'll want the brcm47xx build.

UPDATE: Binary daemonlogger .ipk packages for ALL OpenWRT-supported embedded devices and platforms are now available here: http://bit.ly/dl-owrt

Meet Kenny :-)

Everything on my network is named after a character from South Park, and Kenny seemed like an appropriate name for this little fella because he died many, many horrible deaths along the way to getting this right.

After making all that fuss about missing those big boxes with shiny logos, I decided that Kenny deserved his very own piece of flair. Strangely, no one seems to make OpenWRT badges, so I got him the next best thing - a brushed aluminum Tux badge...

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.

WRT-SPAN Block Diagram (rough draft)

I've got a friend helping me turn this into something a bit more legible (and preferably in SVG format so I can revise it if necessary), but here is a rough draft of what's going on inside my makeshift aggregating ethernet tap:

Hybrid HDD + SSD RAID1

Not really security-related at all, but this is just damn cool. After killing three SSDs in 18 months (thankfully the drives were under warranty, but my data wasn't), I went looking for a better solution. When SSDs crap out, they go suddenly and catastrophically. There's no putting them in the freezer or swapping controller boards with another unit like you can with a mechanical hard drive. Once the sector mapping tables - which are constantly being updated due to wear-leveling algorithms - get corrupted, you're pretty much not getting your data back. Turns out there's a simple way to combine the speed benefits of an SSD with the reliability of an HDD-backed RAID1 mirror.

The lab is growing...

So I happened to find myself with a bunch of old Linksys wireless routers lying around. I like to collect such things from friends and relatives after they've been "fried" in hopes of one day bringing them back to life and hacking them into something useful. We all know how that goes. These poor, forgotten toys spent most of the last few years gathering dust in my basement, longing for someone to play with them. Until now...