carew.dev

Netlink Monitoring with nlmon

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know you could capture netlink packets and view them in wireshark?

# modprobe nlmon
# ip link add type nlmon
# ip link set nlmon0 up

That’s it. Capture on the interface and remove it when done. This is great for figuring out exactly what ip is doing

# tcpdump -i nlmon0

Then you’ve got to be aware of netlink, rtnetlink, etc. It’s also got it’s own DLT

This Blog

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:02:20 -0400

How this blog is built

This blog is still a new project, and so this is subject to change, but for now, this is built with Hugo.

This blog is developed as markdown in it’s own repo, which is pushed to my forgejo instance. The forgejo actions build the blog and publish it to my vps. This all runs in my homelab.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

hugo --minify

rsync -avz --delete public/ root@carew.dev:/var/www/carew.dev/

is basically all it does

IaC Homelab

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:47:13 -0400

Fully IaC Homelab with Terraform, Ansible and Proxmox

Over the past year or so, I’ve gotten much more invested in my homelab.

I’ve always messed around with self-hosting things, even tried hosting Active Directory at my parents house when I was 19, but I’ve never taken any of it serious enough to consider “production”.

That is, until now. I want a fully “production” homelab. I want my resources to be fixed, and I want it to be fully reproducible. I want IaC.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m Jacob Carew — a software engineer who spends a lot of time tinkering with Linux, low-level networking, and infrastructure.

I write here to get better at explaining the things I learn. If something I’ve written saves you a debugging session or sparks an idea, that’s the whole point.

What I work with

Linux — my daily driver and constant rabbit hole
C and Python — the tools I reach for when I need to go fast or go deep
Homelab — a personal lab I manage fully as code using Ansible and Terraform
Networking — routing, netlink, packet capture, the usual

This site

Built with Hugo and hosted at carew.dev.