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:

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...