Collecting router information for error diagnosis and troubleshooting in home networks

With the increasing number of heterogeneous devices that are connected to an average home network, troubleshooting in case of network problems becomes more and more complicated. This is not only because most home users are consumers and not experts in the field of networking, but also because it is usually hard to find the relevant information useful for a systematic error diagnosis. Potential sources of information, such as the web interface of a home router, are not standardized and usually not available to people, e.g. friends or help-lines, that are willing to help from outside of the home. However, many home routers run a Linux driven operating system and are therefore capable of providing a manifold amount of interesting data for debugging network related errors. This paper presents a tool which allows gathering highly customizable data on Linux based home routers using arbitrary textual sources, such as the proc-filesystem, command-line output and configuration files. Additionally, we describe the necessary steps for securely transferring the information to an external helper.