DeviceShelf Blog
Practical how-tos around your home network — identify devices, spot intruders, keep an eye on things.
A practical walkthrough for seeing every device on your home Wi-Fi, working out what each one is, and telling an intruder from your own randomized-MAC phone. Covers the router list, MAC/OUI vendor lookup, hostnames, what to do if someone really is connected, and why a one-time check isn't enough.
Read more →What self-hosted network monitoring means, and how to run device discovery, uptime checks, and alerts on hardware you own without a cloud dashboard. Covers the tool-agnostic basics, running a monitor 24/7 headless, and keeping the data on your own network.
Read more →A step-by-step checklist for locking down a home or homelab network: router credentials, WPA3, guest networks for IoT, WPS and UPnP, exposed ports, firmware, and spotting unknown devices. Includes the free and tool-agnostic way to do each step.
Read more →A rotating, vendor-less MAC address on your network is almost always MAC randomization, a privacy feature in modern phones and laptops. Here is what it does, how to spot it, why it breaks vendor lookup and allow-lists, and how to identify the device anyway.
Read more →Found open ports after a scan and aren't sure which ones matter? This guide explains what an open port is, which are genuinely risky (Telnet, RDP, SMB, exposed databases), how to check the service behind each with nmap, and how to close or firewall the ones that shouldn't be open.
Read more →The built-in Windows commands, the free GUI scanners, and what each one actually shows you. A practical walk-through from arp -a to full device identification, security checks, and live per-device bandwidth.
Read more →How to scan your LAN on Linux two ways: nmap and arp-scan from the terminal, or a GUI when you'd rather read results than flags. Covers the capture permissions Linux needs and how to run DeviceShelf natively via AppImage, .deb or .rpm.
Read more →A practical walkthrough for inventorying the smart plugs, cameras, TVs, speakers and sensors on your LAN. Identify each one by MAC vendor, mDNS/SSDP announcements and open ports, then decide what belongs on a guest VLAN.
Read more →You want a push notification the moment an unknown device connects to your network. What routers offer out of the box, why randomized MAC addresses complicate things, and how to set up alerts that don't wear you down.
Read more →The 2025 cloud outages had a side effect people rarely plan for. The dashboards meant to explain the problem were down with it. The case for one small, self-hosted monitor.
Read more →A device you don't recognize showed up in your Wi-Fi. Here is how to find out what it is (MAC vendor lookup, hostname, open ports, mDNS names) and what to do if it really doesn't belong there.
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