- Introduction
- Scan Methodes
- Components
- Installation
- Update
- Additional information
- Closing words
WIFI / LAN intruder detector with web service monitoring.
Scan your WIFI/LAN-connected devices and receive alerts for unknown device connections. Get warnings if an "always connected" device disconnects. Additionally, assess web service availability by evaluating the HTTP status code, SSL certificate, and service response time. Receive notifications if the SSL certificate changes, the HTTP status code changes, or if the service becomes unreachable. Other features include the detection of unwanted/foreign DHCP servers and device monitoring using the ping command.
Compare this fork with the main project
- arp-scan. The arp-scan system utility is used to search for devices on the network using arp frames.
- Pi-hole. This method is optional. If the Pi-hole DNS server is active, Pi.Alert examines its activity looking for active devices using DNS that have not been detected by method 1.
- dnsmasq. This method is optional. If the DHCP server dnsmasq is active, Pi.Alert examines the DHCP leases (addresses assigned) to find active devices that were not discovered by the other methods.
- Fritzbox. This method is optional. If you use a Fritzbox (a router from the company "AVM"), it is possible to perform a query of the active hosts. This also includes hosts of the guest WLAN and Powerline devices from "AVM".
- Mikrotik. This method is optional. If you use Mikrotik RouterBoard as DHCP server, it is possible to read DHCP leases.
- UniFi. This method is optional. If you use UniFi controller, it is possible to read clients (Client Devices)
- Web service monitoring. This method is optional. An HTTP request is sent and the web server's response is processed. If self signed certificates are used, no validation of the certificate is performed.
- ICMP monitoring. This method is optional. A "ping" is sent to a manually specified IP/hostname/domain name and the response is evaluated
- DHCP Server Scan. This method is optional. Nmap is used to send DHCP requests into the network to detect unknown (rogue) DHCP servers.
ℹ️ Expand for further information
- Scan the network searching connected devices using the scanning methods described earlier
- Checks the reachability of web services and informs about SSL certificate changes
- Store the information in the DB
- Report the changes detected by e-mail and/or other services (Pushsafer, Pushover, NTFY, Gotify and Telegram via shoutrrr) and to the Frontend
- automated DB cleanup tasks
- a pialert-cli that helps to configure login, password and some other things
💡 Additional components and information
There is a configurable login to prevent unauthorized use. The default password is "123456". By default, this is disabled. If you want to use password protection, enable it in the configuration file ~/pialert/config/pialert.conf or via pialert-cli.
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- Manage the devices inventory and the characteristics (individually or with a bulk editor)
- Display in a visual way all the information collected by the back (Sessions, Connected devices, Favorites, Events, Presence, Internet IP address changes, ...)
- Manual Nmap scans and Wake-on-LAN (must be supported by the target device) for regular devices and speedtest for the device "Internet" in the details view
- Simple network relationship display
- Various maintenance tasks and settings (Selection):
- Language selection (english, german, spanish, french, italian)
- AdminLTE-Skins/Theme/FavIcon selection
- Set API-key
- Enable/Disable login
- DB maintenance tools
- Config file editor, and many more ...
- Help/FAQ section
- Notification page with download options
- Journal that tracks operations via the frontend, pialert-cli and cronjob
💡 Additional components and information
- Based on the original, I have created new icons according to the skins. Since I made the experience that iOS devices do not load homescreen icons from insecure sources (no SSL or selfsigned SSL), you can also link the icons directly from this repository.
- List of Favicons/Homescreen icons
There are various ways to submit a request to the backend. I will use curl/bash and curl/php as examples in the following.
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Currently the API offers the possibility to query 6 things:
- System status (Scan on or off, Counts all, online, offline, archived and new devices)
- All online devices (MAC, Name, Vendor, LastIP, Infrastructure, Infrastructure_port)
- All offline devices (MAC, Name, Vendor, LastIP, Infrastructure, Infrastructure_port)
- All online ICMP devices (IP, Name, RTT)
- All offline ICMP devices (IP, Name)
- Information about a specific device (all information, without events and presence)
💡 Additional components and information
Initially designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, probably it can run on some other Linux distributions which use the "apt" package manager. Check "Things to keep in mind when using different Linux distributions" before using Pi.Alert with another Debian based distribution like DietPi or Ubuntu Server to see, if there are any special notes to follow.
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💡 Additional components and information
- Things to keep in mind when using different Linux distributions (will be updated if necessary)
- If you want to use my fork as LXC container, feel free to check out the awesome Helper scripts from tteck/Proxmox
- Another active developed fork of Pi.Alert based on Docker can be found here: jokob-sk/Pi.Alert
- The original, but unmaintained, Pi.Alert can be found here pucherot/Pi.Alert
You can always check for a new release using the "Update Check" button in the sidebar. This check will show you if the GeoLite2 DB is installed or up to date and which new features, fixes or changes are available in the new Pi.Alert release, if you are not already using the latest version.
There are no updates as Github release package, because the update function is done by the "wget" command anyway. Instead, after a certain number of commits, a new archive is created, which is used as the source for the update.
This update script is only recommended for an already existing installation of this fork. If you are using another fork, I recommend uninstalling it first. If you backup the database, it may be possible to continue using it with my fork after a patch (pialert-cli).
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An archive of older versions can be found at https://leiweibau.net/archive/pialert. This archive contains all release notes of my fork.
GPL 3.0 Read more here
- Animated GIF (Loading Animation) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Loading_Animation.gif
- Selfhosted Fonts https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans
- Bootstrap Icons https://github.com/twbs/icons
- For final processing of background images https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/make-seamless-texture.php
- Translations: https://www.deepl.com and ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com)
This code is a collaborative body of work, with special thanks to:
Macleykun, Final-Hawk, TeroRERO, jokob-sk, tteck and many more