68
Internal network monitoring (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by ueiqkkwhuwjw@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How do you monitor your homelab network for internal attackers? E.g. you have a publicly available service and theres a vulnerability that you miss or you pull a bad update and suddenly someone has access to your VM/machine/container. How could you increase the chances of automatically detecting that?

The built in IDS in opnsense seems pretty useless, and doesn't really help detect if e.g. someone is trying to exploit services between your vlans (I could be using it wrong though).

Crowdsec in opnsense is nice but it seems to also be primarily for protecting from malicious actors coming from the WAN.

I've heard about the opnsense zenarmor plugin but you have to agree to a privacy policy to use it?

Another option I guess would be collecting firewall logs and making custom notifications for things that you think would be suspicious on your network.

I also know update cooldowns and not exposing anything could largely solve this too, but the monitoring and alerting question really interests me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm in the process of building a monitoring system with grafana stack.

Right now I have monitoring panels for some common metrics and logs. I am yet to set up alerts.

The idea being that if something goes wrong some metric will grow up unexpectedly, for instance network traffic. And I would get a notification.

What I'm still considering is what would I consider abnormal behavior, so I could set up the thresholds.

[-] Mikelius@lemmy.ml 2 points 13 hours ago

This is exactly how my network is setup. All devices log to my syslog server which I feed into a database with a self made python app, and Grafana goes from there. It's been running nonstop for like 5 years without any problems, so I'd say your in the right path!

It's also helped me catch things like:

  • finding out android leaked IPs outside VPN tunnels on connect (prior to headlines claiming this)
  • finding out nslookup on termux ignores the phone's DNS settings and tries to use Google instead
  • finding other devices that ignore my DNS server settings
  • noticing that my work Mac will turn itself on in some weird silent passive mode in the middle of the night to try and send data to apple (sleep or powered off don't matter) - caught this from the logs sent by my router
[-] ueiqkkwhuwjw@lemmy.world 1 points 6 minutes ago

Very interesting. Thanks for your input :)

[-] ueiqkkwhuwjw@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah that's kind of what I was originally thinking to do too.

this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
68 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

59604 readers
1104 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz