Technology Insights

Use Wireshark And DD-WRT Router Firmware To Imitate Port Monitoring On A Router Switch Port

Insights24 Comments

Earlier today I needed to find the quickest and easiest way to monitor all traffic to and from a specific device on my network. The goal was to see how much bandwidth based on a specific amount of time that the device was using. My initial hope was that I could configure port monitoring on my WRT54G running DD-WRT firmware however I quickly found out this is not an option. I eventually settled on adding a couple iptables commands that would send all traffic destined for or sourced from a specific IP address to another IP address. Follow the directions below to add the iptables commands to a router running DD-WRT firmware and then to capture the traffic on a computer running Wireshark.

Technology Insights

Create A Google Analytics Filter To Exclude A Group Or Subnet Of IP Addresses

Insights8 Comments

If you are using Google Analytics for web analytics it can be beneficial to exclude certain addresses to provide a more accurate view of traffic to the site. There are numerous reasons that excluding IP’s from the analytics statistics such as if it is a personal site that doesn’t do a lot of traffic and you are working on all the time from home the analytics results might not provide a real world view of what other visitors view the most. Another example might be if it’s a corporate web site that numerous developers, QA personal, and others employees are visiting from the same address space it could skew the analytics results because of such a high concentration of traffic from one IP address or subnet. One of the great reasons for reviewing the web analytics data provided by Google Analytics is to see what pages customers view or what region your customers are from. This type of data can help prioritize the areas of the site that should be worked on the most or what content provides the best return on investment and if the data includes your own traffic it might not provide accurate data for you to review.