I added some boards to this fucking Beowolf of a fucking Raspberry Pi!

Pi with 4GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 8 USB ports, 2 Ethernet ports, and a sense hat.

Gonna put this between my modem and router and see what fun I can get up to.

Would like to build a web portal that tracks my family's data usage with the tcpdump to graph approach, and probably a little weather widget to go with it using the sense hat.

I just hope for you that your dad doesn't have too much free time in the evening.

How's the performance of a pi as network device?
I use a pi3 as NAS (via Samba) and it just gets to ~5MB/s (LAN and wifi). Which is fucken slow (yeah yeah i know, overhead and so on, but still).

I can't imagine this works well with even 3-4 active devices? Especially this whole pihole thing. As soon as there are 2-3 1080p streams going on, what's the throughput? Preferrably wifi between endpoints and pi of course.

@nitwhiz I'm going to find out!

Based on what I've read...

Quite a few threads suggest a single pi won't be able to handle this.

It looks like I may end up using a second PI (a much smaller one, maybe even a zero) to simply route the tcpdump to this Pi... and then let this "powerhouse" try to process that.

I haven't put her to computational tests, but running a headless Rasbian right off the SSD is probably the top end of what a Pi can do.

I'm so excited that I don't know the answer to this!

And as for the Dad thing... I AM the Dad. And oh boy, do I have a lot of spare time in the evenings.

@HiFiWiFiSciFi dad? Free evenings?? How come? :o

teach me, master!

Btw, for a simple, cheap and non-resources-intensive traffic tracker you could use bind or some other dns server ;) it logs all the lookup requests.

Ofc it won't capture *all* the traffic [do you need all the packets tho?] nor will it catch the ip/mac-based requests [i.e. non-dns]. But it does quite a lot already.

Also, conntrack -E or an iptables -I OUTPUT -j LOG rule to log all outgoing packets would probably work great for you. Tcpdump adds quite a bit of overhead to the machine. I'm not sure atm, but I guess the conntrack doesn't even change the NIC's mode to monitoring.. I think it simply monitors the netfilter table in the kernelspace

Port mirroring /ccna - you can mirror/duplicate all the traffic from all ports to single one for analysis without hooking up a raspberry between. B)

@netikras @blindXfish

To start I’d like to make a bar chart simply showing each devices internet use so tpcdump might be overkill.

While I can parse data and chart it like the back of my hand, I am ignorant to what’s the best way to get that data in the case of networking.

I’lol definitely look into these approaches to make a smaller but still useable dataset.

Thanks!

Traffic snooping is gonna be a big yikes from me

Depending on your router you can mirror or even monitor/graph the traffic. Most of it is going to be boring though as typically almost all of it is encrypted.