Network Evaluation, Repair and diagnostics (N.E.R.D.) is a project developed in UCL a year ago by 4 students of the DCNDS course as their course project. NERD tries to investigate the results that a deep packet inspection with a higher knowledge about protocol operation would have in keeping track of the health of the network. The program passively monitors the traffic of the network by receiving a copy of all the traffic that goes through the gateway of the network, keeps track of the state of the peers on a stream and by using per packet or per stream rules reason about problem and misconfiguration of the network.

At the end of the project term, NERD has working and tested parsing, analysis and error detection modules for HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and ICMP. A DHCP module also exists but has not been fully tested due to the untimely departure of one team member from the project. In addition, some analysis is done at layer 2/3. On the presentation we will see some of the problematics that came up during the project regarding the systems architecture and the way we monitor in real time network.