Turning a Gigabit Router into a Full-Network Traffic Monitor: Tapping into an IDS to Monitor Your Entire Home Network
At FlashedRouter, we love tinkering with hardware. The idea of setting up a network tap to monitor WAN traffic has always intrigued us. So when we got our hands on the Fenvi AX3000—a fast, solid router with a dual-core CPU—we dove into its network stack to see what it could do. This quick guide walks you through how we turned that router into a passive network tap for monitoring internet traffic across an entire network. Step 1 : Identify Ethernet Ports The first step is to identify the physical Ethernet ports so we can assign one to mirror the WAN traffic. Using a simple ifconfig command, we can see that this router exposes multiple identifiable network interfaces. Each one typically maps to a physical port on the device, which lets us configure one as a dedicated mirror port. root@router:~# ifconfig br-lan Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr E4:XX:XX:XX:XX:00 inet addr:192.168.0.1 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 ...