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

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.

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...