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Wi-Fi Network Monitoring Tools?
Brian the Wise asks: "For all of you with large and/or complex wireless networks out there, what tools (commercial or otherwise) do you use to keep an eye on the health and state of your network? I'm not only interested in the security/IDS side of things, but also bad packets, reflections, clients flip-flopping between APs, etc. I've looked at all the usual open source projects, and so far Kismet comes the closest to my needs, but the wireless drivers on Linux do too much sanitizing of packets so I never see the bad ones. I know the FreeBSD drivers show more, but some of the advanced stuff (ie extra info from the Cisco Aironet drivers) is not supported by tcpdump or ethereal. Is there anything I can do besides getting up close and personal with the Linux network stack and drivers?"
With my cheap linksys Prism2 card and the Wlan-ng (well that was a while ago, but I supposed the most recent versions are at least as good) I used to see a lot of bad packets in Kismet... What sucks is that there's no way any driver will report signal strength accurately...to do that maybe a radio scanner would be the best tool..
I keep an eye on my wireless subnet with a separate box running kismet... tells me everything I need to know.
Heh... it also told me immediately the first time my neighbor fired up his brand-spanking-new access point. I went over to his house (where he was washing his car) and asked him if he'd gotten a new AP for christmas? (nod) a Linksys? (another nod) running on channel 6? (confused look and another nod)... I briefly explained wireless network surveillance/network sniffers, and gave him some basic tips on WEP, disabling SSID broadcasting, and MAC address filtering. He thinks I'm some kind of hacker now... got a feeling I'll be getting some "tech support" calls from their place...
Works for me, and it's free... works well with the prism2-based cards. I bought a bunch of these: and they work great with the wlan drivers.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
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