Ever wanted to know what is going on over your home network?

Sure, you could install some IDS/IPS like Snort on a raspberry pi, configure some rules and go to town… OR you can write your own for fun! That’s what I did. Perhaps I took the road less travelled — ignoring the fact that some times the road less travelled is “less travelled” for a reason. But I digress.

I was curious about what was on my network and I had requirements. I wanted …

• A basic network scanner that will list all the IPs on my network (nmap)
• A detailed scan of each IP on my network (nmap)
• A dashboard that showed the results and scans over time — including historic data showing ports seen in the past and ports now seen (try to find those pesky intermittent port-gremlins)
• Regular scans that updated the dashboard

I COULD have used something like OpenVAS or Nessus and played with the configs to do what I want, but I wasn’t looking for a vulnerability scanner or real complexity, more of a “Here’s a layout of the IPs and their port scans on your network” in a nice “live” display. The extra vulnerability look-ups weren’t really needed.

The final result (v1.0) is 270-ish lines of python and a single dashboard.html file — quite nice for me, as I plan to just kick it off on a basic raspberry pi with a dedicated monitor. Eventually, I plan to add alerting whenever a new IP or port pops up on my network.

Here’s the GitHub for those interested: Calebs Basic Network Scanner

And here’s a picture of the dashboard: