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Comment by tpfour | Hacker News Reader

I finally convinced myself of building an opnsense wifi router after years of procrastination. I want to take back control of my network, or at least monitor it properly.

What are the most interesting network analysis tools I should look into? I'm talking more about high-level visualisations. For example, I'd be interested in keeping a list of every device that's ever connected to my network, and maybe get alerts upon detecting it. Or map requests/connections in real-time/historically on a globe in HTML5. Just some fun stuff to actually get a sense of what's going on in my network.

Any recommendations?

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I have used ntopng w/nprobe as collector of netflow data in both work environments and at home. If you have any educational affiliation there's a good chance you can get a pro and Enterprise license for free for both products that renews annually. The community edition is somewhat limited in what it can do but is worth taking a look at.

https://www.ntop.org/products/traffic-analysis/ntop/

I would still recommend the Turris Omnia [1], even though I fought it a little too much and moved to Ubiquiti.

Basically you want a fast machine with a good switch, running something like OpenWRT. You may also want to play around with OPNsense [2] in a VM.

1: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/

2: https://opnsense.org/

mitmproxy is what you need. I've installed it on a Raspberry Pi that then acts as a hotspot. mitmproxy allows me to see every bit of data that is being put on the wire. All telemetry, pings, contacts, and more being transmitted home (respective of encryption). A transparent proxy is essential if you want to deep drive into what the apps on your network are actually doing.

Do you happen to know what added latency one can expect from using one of those? (Apologies if my brief googling was off-point and this is a well answered question)

Did a little googling and couldn’t find any benchmarks but the new v4 release claims a 4x improvement in speed.

https://mitmproxy.org/posts/releases/mitmproxy4/

carpie.net has a great set of videos on using a Raspberry Pi as your own home network DHCP/DNS. I set it up relatively quickly and I definitely have a greater sense of control over my home network.

How do you deal with the combined USB/Ethernet 100MB/s bus cap?

Probably by not having 100 MB/s of DHCP and DNS traffic at home.

Some of us can't pull that much data over our uplink...

This was fixed in the newer Pis: https://libre.computer/2018/03/21/raspberry-pi-3-model-b-rev...

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