Sniff Wi-Fi

For some Wi-Fi professionals, WLAN Pi is the ultimate swiss army knife. For others, it is a byzantine puzzle.  Your humble blogger takes great pride in taking the complex and making it accessible. For the WLAN Pi, it starts with the Basics. The WLAN Pi project has been part of the WLAN professional community for several years. Conceived as a some-assembly-required kit project, the Pi has now grown beyond its humble roots. Your humble blogger has been fascinated by the WLAN Pi for some time, in large part because of the involvement of Jerry Olla. Jerry is a long time member of the WLAN community. He is based in Wisconsin, which makes me like him. He believes that the Milwaukee Brewers should not have received a publicly-funded baseball stadium, which makes me like him less. (I kid, I kid.) Jerry reached out to yours truly after a tweet expressing frustration at the WLAN Pi experience. Many Wi-Fi people have read, seen or been told about cool stuff that can be done with ...

Recommending the exact opposite of what every enterprise Wi-Fi infrastructure vendor recommends can be awkward.  As awkward as the first meeting between Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor) and the Wu-Tang Clan?  (WARNING: extremely NSFW) Maybe not that awkward.   But while Hank had trouble relating to Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killah, Wi-Fi folks can avoid trouble by being aware of an increasingly common problem, the Ghost Frame Killah. Ghosts, as we all are well aware, are apparitions that can have a detrimental effect on buildings built on Indian burial grounds, while remaining unseen to our earthly eyes.  If you have Ghosts, you may need to call a Ghost Bouncer to solve the problem. Ghost Frames, on the other hand, are Wi-Fi frames ("packets") that can have a detrimental effect on Wi-Fi networks, while remaining unseen to our earthly Wi-Fi sniffing tools.  The solution to Ghost Frames is a simple one, but one that requires Wi-Fi folks to do th...

A year ago yours truly wrote about the importance of device location when capturing Wi-Fi frames in a post titled, " Worthless Capture ".  Well, recently another Wi-Fi sniffing bugaboo has become more prevalent: devices that lack the physical capability to capture a  data frames. This whole problem really stems from 802.11n.  As many people (including the author) found out when the iPad was released in 2010, not all 802.11n devices have the same capabilities .  That is an annoyance to consumers, but it's downright dangerous to Wi-Fi professionals.  Most Wi-Fi networks require sniffing at some point (for surveying, for event preparation, for troubleshooting, etc.), but most Wi-Fi sniffing devices are incapable of sniffing high rate data frames. One more time: Most Wi-Fi sniffing devices are incapable of sniffing high rate data frames. The Linksys WUSB600N, which yours truly uses to sniff with WildPackets OmniPeek?   Only 2 radio chains (a radio chain ...

Sometimes I dream That he is me You've got to see that's how I dream to be The dream I riff, the dream I sniff Like Nate I want to be like Nate (Silver) Much has been made of the increased emphasis on statistical analysis, especially in the wake of New York Times blogger Nate Silver correctly predicting the electoral results for all 50 states in the recent United States presidential election.  Can analytics be applied to WLANs?  Of course they can.  It's just a matter of sniffing the right stuff. There are a lot of bad WiFi networks out there. There.  I said it.  It's out there and I can't take it back.  I see a lot of Wi-Fi in my travels.  Almost all of it could be improved upon and much of it seems like it was installed by folks with little understanding of how 802.11 networks work. So, what do we do to fix it? We can have best practices.  We can finally ditch automatic RF controls.  (Please, people.  If you haven't h...