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

This is pretty complicated stuff, so I'm going to start out with a fairly long-winded and familiar analogy. If you're already well-versed on terms like MAC addresses and ARP caches, and the challenges of port mirroring, feel free to skip this part. Or not. You might learn something. I sure did. :-)

To expand on a time-honored metaphor often taught in computer networking classes, imagine that your home network is the postal service. It's the postal service's job to sort and deliver mail to the appropriate recipient, presumably at their home address. The postal service employs mail carriers to physically shuffle millions of properly addressed, stamped, and postmarked envelopes around the country to wherever they need to go each day.