The thing that watches my network.

Most of what I write here is the second part. The build is pretty ordinary and you could draw it yourself. The useful part is all the ways a thing like this tells you it's healthy when it isn't.

If you only take one line:

Something that can't fail loudly will fail quietly. And quiet looks exactly like working.

Every problem I found was a version of that. A safety check that could never actually trigger. A heartbeat that meant something other than what I thought. An empty queue, because nothing was arriving, not because everything was handled.

Who this is for

You have a network you care about, a computer that can stay on, and an AI you work with. You want the boring 3am stuff handled without you. And you're not willing to trust something that can't show its work.

You don't need my gear. I use one common brand of home network gear and a small always-on computer, but none of the lessons care about that.

What it can break

This thing has its hands on real hardware. When an access point drops off, it restarts it, and everyone on that access point loses their connection for a minute or two. That's the job, and it's also the risk.

• It can act on a wrong reading. Mine once came within one unrelated bug of restarting two healthy access points.
• Without a limit on how often it acts, one bad rule can restart the same device all night.
• If it loses track of what it already did, it can do the same thing twice.
• If whatever watches it goes quiet, it can stop working and nothing tells you.

That's why this is a write-up, not a program to install. Read Keeping it safe before you build anything like it, and run yours in watch-only mode until you trust what it reports.

The guide

There's a download at the end with all of it in plain text files, meant for you to hand straight to your AI. Skip to that if you just want to start.

One more thing up front

I have a day job. All of this got built after hours, with AI as the collaborator. That worked, and I wouldn't have finished otherwise. It also caused its own kind of mistake, and I wrote those down too, because leaving them out would be a lie about how it got made.