NetWatch: real-time network diagnostics in the terminal (open source)

Posted by Potential-Access-595@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 23 comments

I built NetWatch to make transient network incidents easier to catch from a terminal session.

It already handled interface stats, live connections, packet capture, health probes, traceroute, and process bandwidth. The new part is a rolling Flight Recorder:

- arm a 5-minute capture window

- let it rotate in the background

- freeze when the issue happens

- export a bundle with `packets.pcap`, connections, health snapshots, bandwidth context, DNS analytics, alerts, and a summary

The goal is to keep both the packet evidence and the surrounding operational state instead of only dumping a pcap after the fact.

Open source:

https://github.com/matthart1983/netwatch

Would love feedback from people who do real incident response or production debugging.

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xoCruellaDeVil@reddit

I love how Claude loves calling things xxxWatch. I've seen FinanceWatch, ThreatWatch, and now NetWatch. Great stuff hahah. Atleast pick your own name.

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Scoutron@reddit

initial commit, 23 files changed +4336

Rust

Oh boy I love AI slop.

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I took a quick look at the code and I'd say it was definitely written with an LLM. For example, in main.rs, at the start, if a condition passes it writes the config, it uses NetwatchConfig::save() which returns an error if a call to self::path() returns None.

Then after that it prints out the config path it wrote to with a match NetwatchConfig::path() statement that handles the None to say "Config written (could not determine path)" which is on itself a stupid message to print out, but the real issue is that it will never trigger, if path() returns None it will fail before that match statement is executed because the call to save() has a question mark after it.

(If you dont know Rust, the question mark means to propagate the error up to the caller to handle)

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Scoutron@reddit

It sucks because I’m quite interested in getting started with taking coding more seriously as an experienced admin, and every single post on this sub and some other ones that has a custom built tool has this exact same thing happen. Shame.

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ollytheninja@reddit

If you’re wanting to learn to code and you put in the time to understand what you’re building and think critically about the architecture and logic of every line of code you’ll get a different response than if you ask an LLM to build something, don’t look at the code and yeet it onto a reddit sub for feedback

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