If you have done any wifi base station analysis, or used passive wireless analysis tools like wavemon or Kismet to monitor your local RF environment, you may have spotted a persistent, unidentified hidden Wi-Fi network broadcasting on the exact same channel and frequency as your primary access points.

The mystery access point typically broadcasts an encrypted hidden beacon with an unrecognizable MAC address prefix like 62:45:b8:.... It doesn’t match known vendor OUIs in IEEE databases, and it frequently triggers “Rogue AP” alerts on managed access points.

Smokeping is a self-contained network monitoring app , capable of monitoring using ICMP/Ping, HTTP, DNS – as well as other signals generated from CLI monitoring tools (e.g. curl, dig, mtr etc). It provides a web-based monitoring UI to chart the probe measurements so no further monitoring apps (like Prometheus) are needed.

Running smokeping on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is a fun experiment in lightweight computing . Using Apache Mod FastCGI makes the app usable on the meager hardware.