Uncovering the Unexpected: What ElastiFlow Revealed in my Home Network

Since joining ElastiFlow as a Sales Engineer, my curiosity and endless desire to tinker have found a new focus: my home network.  

I built my first network while in college. I will never forget climbing through the ceilings of an industrial complex running Cat5 cables, in the middle of the summer, in Texas. It was a little spicy. Fast forward thirty years, and I find myself very thankful for the prevalence of wireless networking as I redesign my home network.

The Setup: From Gaming to Governance

After a bit of research, I settled on updating my network with Ubiquiti gear. It is easy to configure, fits into the budget, and, most importantly, is available to purchase locally, filling my need for instant gratification. One edge router, 2 wireless access points, and a PoE switch later, a new network was born.

I made the ultimate sacrifice and turned my gaming PC into a server running several Linux virtual machines to support my newfound monitoring habit. Installing ElastiFlow was easy, saying goodbye to Star Citizen for a while was a little bit harder. I had everything up and running in an afternoon and started digging through dashboards, watching graphs spike with exuberance.

Small Scale, Big Insights

On average, I have about 45 devices generating traffic on my network, generating roughly 25-30 flows per second. In the world of enterprise networking, that’s a drop in the bucket. However, even at this scale, the insights were immediate and surprising.

The first thing that caught my eye was how global my internet access really is. ElastiFlow’s MaxMind GeoIP database integration opened my eyes to a world of traffic I was previously blissfully unaware of.

A snapshot of all the internet traffic leaving my house.

The Aha Moment: Why Are My Printers Talking?

What really caught my eye was which devices are talking to where. I started isolating the traffic by device, a very easy thing to do with ElastiFlow, and uncovered something that has become a cornerstone in my demos with prospective customers. 

I quickly found 2 devices that were quite chatty with devices off the network, out in the wild. What was most surprising, however, is what the devices are: 3D Printers. I believed they were innocent little devices that were simply on the network waiting for my latest Warhammer bit to be sent over for printing. This is not the case. They are, in fact, in near constant conversation with other things in other places.

One printer talking to 25+ servers over a 15-minute period.  

Map of where those servers happen to be.

Consider the importance of identifying rogue devices at the enterprise level. I can almost guarantee you have some on your network right now. Whether you’re monitoring your home network or you’re part of the NetOps or DevOps team in your organization, filling the network visibility gap is critical. What can you do? Get a free trial of ElastiFlow today.