who's on

Home network dashboard for the ASUS RT-AX1800S. Shows all connected devices and lets you block or unblock internet access per device. Comes as a web dashboard (whoson-server) and a CLI (whoson-cli).

I built this because I was paranoid about some IoT devices on my network having persistent network egress. One day I'll figure out real (non-cloud) networking and implement some VPC-like stuff to manage this.

Requirements

• Go 1.25+
• ASUS RT-AX1800S (or compatible ASUS router running the same firmware API)

Build

just

Binaries are written to bin/. You can also build individually:

just whoson-cli
just whoson-server

Or with go build directly:

go build -o bin/whoson-cli ./cmd/whoson-cli
go build -o bin/whoson-server ./cmd/whoson-server

Configuration

Create a .env file or export the following environment variables:

R_USER=admin
R_PASSWORD=yourpassword
OUI_DB=./testdata/ouiDB.json   # optional, improves vendor lookup

The server also respects ROUTER_URL (default http://192.168.50.1), LISTEN_ADDR (default :8080), and OUI_DB.

Container

Pre-built images are published to GHCR on every push to main and on version tags:

docker run -p 8080:8080 \
  -e R_USER=admin \
  -e R_PASSWORD=yourpassword \
  ghcr.io/adityarathod/whoson/whoson-server:main

Use a version tag to pin to a release:

ghcr.io/adityarathod/whoson/whoson-server:1.2.3

To cut a new release, push a v-prefixed tag:

git tag v1.2.3
git push origin v1.2.3

This triggers the publish workflow and produces 1.2.3 and 1.2 image tags automatically.

To build and run locally instead:

just image
just image-run

whoson-server

A web dashboard at http://localhost:8080. Shows all devices as cards with live status, connectivity, and signal strength. Supports filtering, search, and a display mode that redacts identifying information for screen sharing.

./bin/whoson-server

whoson-cli

Lists devices and supports block/unblock from the command line.

# List all devices as JSON (default)
./bin/whoson-cli

# List as an ASCII table
./bin/whoson-cli --output-format table

# Block / unblock a device
./bin/whoson-cli --block AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF
./bin/whoson-cli --unblock AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

Output fields

Field	Description
mac	Device MAC address
name	Device name (NickName preferred over Name)
ip	Current DHCP-assigned IP
vendor	Hardware vendor (OUI DB, falls back to router value)
rssi	Signal strength in dBm; empty for wired
online	Whether the device is currently connected
blocked	Whether internet access is blocked
connectivity	wlan-24, wlan-5, or wired

How it works

Authentication

Login is a form POST to /login.cgi. Credentials are encoded as base64(username:password) in the login_authorization field — the same scheme as HTTP Basic Auth but sent as a form, not a header. On success the router sets an asus_token session cookie. All subsequent requests carry this cookie and require a Referer: http://192.168.50.1/index.asp header.

The router uses JavaScript redirects instead of HTTP 3xx — unauthenticated requests to any page return HTTP 200 with an inline JS redirect to /Main_Login.asp. Only one session is active at a time; logging in from a new IP requires the previous session to be terminated first.

Device discovery

Device data is fetched from /update_clients.asp, which returns a JS file containing a fromNetworkmapd variable — a JSON array of {MAC: ClientObject} maps. Each object includes name, IP, RSSI, connectivity type (isWL: 0 = wired, 1 = 2.4 GHz, 2 = 5 GHz), and internet mode ("allow" or "block").

Block / unblock

Internet access is controlled through the router's Parental Controls (MULTIFILTER) system. The current ruleset is scraped from /ParentalControl.asp, which embeds the MULTIFILTER nvram state as JavaScript (MULTIFILTER_MAC, MULTIFILTER_ENABLE, MULTIFILTER_DEVICENAME). To block, a device's enable flag is set to 2; to unblock, it's set to 0. The updated state is POSTed to /start_apply.htm with action_script=restart_firewall.

OUI database

Vendor names are resolved using the ASUS OUI database — a JSON map of 6-character hex OUI prefix to vendor name:

https://nw-dlcdnet.asus.com/plugin/js/ouiDB.json

Download it and point OUI_DB at the file. If unset, the router's own vendor string is used as a fallback.