Following configuration is used on the routers. OSPF Configurationįor testing purpose I restricted my setup to area 0 to which both routers are connected. The following figures show the final setup. Linux bridges were used to connect the routers and the hosts. To keep things lite weight I used NameSpaces to simulate hosts connected to the routers. The actual setup however needs some hosts on the network to test the connectivity after implementing OSPF. I used virt-manager to setup the test network. MikroTik © recommends 128 MB RAM and 128 MB of HDD as minimal hardware requirements.

The footprint of the router VMs are quite small. All for these are installed as VMs on my home desktop. The following diagram describes my network setup. So I decided to test OSPF routing with Router OS. This is perfect for learning purposes and experimenting at home. What is more amazing is they provide a RouterOS in a virtual form-factor called Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) that can be installed on hypervisors like KVM/VirtualBox/VMware. I came across RouterOS by MikroTik © which provides advances routing protocol support. Ntop can even be run from a docker container Now the monitoring data from ntopng can can be exported to Grafana.

This will keep the monitored traffic separate from the monitoring traffic. Accessing the Monitoring resultĪs the Gigabit port of the Pi is used to receive mirrored traffic, the monitoring dashboard is accessed over the wlan0 interface. I used the Rasbian image for the pi and Ntopng can be easily installed from their repository using apt. It can aggregate and produce nice traffic analysis summary. To monitor traffic over long time I used Ntop. These tools give a live view of the packets going through my home network. Once the traffic is available on the mirrored port, I was able to run traffic monitors like wireshark, tshark and tcpdump on the mirror port to analyze all the traffic between the router and ISP. All traffic monitoring happens on the Pi. The mirrored traffic is passed on to the Raspberry Pi. I used this to mirror traffic arriving through the router and the ISP connection. The NetGear GS105E switch provides the capability of port mirroring.

The following figure shows the connectivity. To get around the problem I decided to put the traffic monitor on the WAN side of the router. This makes traffic monitoring a bit of a problem on the LAN side. As with most people I have very few devices that connect to the router over an Ethernet cable, most devices are wifi capable. The router provides both wire and wifi connectivity. I have a PPPoE connection to my ISP that connects to my home router. So, I decided to do a weekend project to implement traffic analysis on my home network. I had the Raspberry Pi laying around for some time without doing any major function and so was the NetGear switch.

Ntopng mikrotik routeros