These Are a Few of My Favorite Things...

Rat's nests of CAT5, tracing with ping, these are a few of my favorite things... Especially when everything's all neatly connected to a single device that magically does everything I need. I'm still going to publish Part III of my guide on building Kenny, but in the meantime, I've found a fantastic replacement for a whole pile of old Linksys gear. I haven't named him yet, but I'm learning to love my new Mikrotik RouterBoard RB2011L, which I acquired for a quite reasonable $99 from r0c-n0c.com.

The user interface for this RouterOS-based device is awkward, non-intuitive, and very poorly documented. That said, this is an incredibly powerful device. I recommend that everyone buy one as soon as possible, before they stop making them. There are OpenWRT works-in-progress for other Mikrotik RouterBoard platforms, and I'm crossing my fingers that this one will be appearing on that list Real Soon Now.

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.