Instrumenting home networks

In managing and troubleshooting home networks, one of the challenges is in knowing what is actually happening. Availability of a record of events that occurred on the home network before trouble appeared would go a long way toward addressing that challenge. In this position/work-in-progress paper, we consider requirements for a general-purpose logging facility for home networks. Such a facility, if properly designed, would potentially have other uses. We describe several such uses and discuss requirements to be considered in the design of a logging platform that would be widely supported and accepted. We also report on our initial deployment of such a facility.