RE: Wireshark
Wireshark is indeed an awesome tool, but unless you can configure a SPAN (mirror) port at the LAN and/or WAN interface of your home router, the only devices attempting to gain access you will see are those connecting directly to the machine where you are running Wireshark, not the network. Maybe you can configure a mirror port on the Linksys/Cisco WRT routers with DD-WRT firmware--I don't recall, and perhaps newer revisions are smarter and provide such capability, though unlikely for consumer level devices. Am I missing something?