Self-hosted home network traffic monitoring with ntopng and a Fritz Box | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosted home network traffic monitoring with ntopng and a Fritz Box

davquar.it

72 pointsfortym226 comments

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Off-topic but interesting to this audience: since the last update, Fritz boxes support Wireguard.

https://en.avm.de/news/the-latest-news-from-fritz/2022/wireg...

nice! I wasn't aware of that thanks.

Had to upgrade to a beta FW for my older model but it works a treat!

This is neat.

A word of caution, depending on how the network is laid out, this could cause severe bandwidth overhead if there isn't a dedicated, and unmonitored, interface for the capture to flow over.

One needs to be careful not to have the captured traffic flowing out to the monitor via an interface that's being monitored, otherwise load will snowball.

The example here omits eth1, so I'm presuming that's the path the capture takes, but it would have been nice to see the author call this out. Otherwise, without some sort of capture-side filter, which the fritzdump.sh script and example doesn't seem to include, the capture will include a copy of the monitoring stream and the bandwidth will snowball.

There's also the issue of the monitoring port likely not able to capture full bandwidth of the aggregate of the other ports being monitored. Since the buffer in the device likely isn't unlimited, there's a possibility for lost data during times of high traffic.

Fritzboxes have the best non-OpenWRT OS IMHO

I agree. Probably best consumer-level router OS

iirc fritz-os was very much based on openwrt, same as most homerouters

Not sure that is the case. Most use Linux.

openwrt indeed uses the linux kernel

Yes. That does not make Fritzos a fork or continuation of OpenWrt.

true. thou the second part of your comment sounds like you are saying that openwrt and linux have little in common.

They're the only home routers I've ever owned which aren't constantly failing in some way. It's a shame they're only really available in Germany (and I guess Austria).

I’ve seen FritzBoxes in a computer shop in Spain as well. Don’t know how wide-spread they are in Spain however.

I'm in the UK and use Zen Internet as my ISP. Zen distribute a FRITZ!Box 7530 as their home router [1].

I was sufficiently pleased by the FRITZ!Box that I bought a 2nd one to extend the wifi in my home - very easy to do with the fritz devices.

[1] https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/broadband-router

Can confirm they are in use down here in Australia. I know someone who just upgraded their 7490 to a 7590 due to compatibility changes with our National Broadband Network (enablement of SOS-ROC).

I brought mine over from the UK for use here in Germany and just upgraded. Sadly it seems their extenders are only available with EU plugs so I'll have to send some back for my parents, they really are that hassle free that it's worth the effort.

I’ve been doing something similar at home for years. An OpenBSD box at the egress point exports IPFIX data to nfdump and I designed custom charts for myself using the legacy dygraphs. IPFIX plus nfdump is wonderful as I can quickly use a tcpdump-like interface to very quickly search against data from months ago and the dygraphs charting allows me to easily see traffic patterns with the ability to quickly zoom in.

Slightly off-topic: "an" should not be used with words beginning with H, unless the H is unvoiced, such as "an homage".

You are right, thank you :D

I just assumed that, because the server was providing resistance to the flow of packets on the network, it was properly called "an ohm server".

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