Sniff Wi-Fi

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QoS the packets of iPad ,  and all through the air  not a station was Probing, not even a hair When suddenly on to my Wireshark screen Appeared Video, Voice and Background, it seemed "But alas", I exclaimed, as I looked at the MACs This is only one tablet, not a bushel or stack To the standard I looked, to decipher the meaning And to you, dear reader, I offer this gleaning The standard in question is dot11e and the goal of its authors was to keep the air free from clutter like YouTube and Facebook or Twitter that might cause your voice conference to lag and/or jitter But remember, dear sniffers, we're still talking WiFi A world where each access point, smartphone and MiFi makes its own way to the channel or not deciding on rates, QoS and the lot So take heed if your WiFI must work for those apps that users just love but treat admins like saps a smartphone may say, "thi...

About a year and a half ago, yours truly wrote about WiFi transmit power levels in iPhones .  Things have changed since then.  And possibly the biggest change (to iPhones, at least) is how aggressive iPhones are in modifying transmit power levels.   In the "Mighty iPhone Power Ranges" blog post, I wrote about the value of setting AP transmit power levels to approximately the same level as client/station device power levels.  Over the past year or so, more and more client/station devices have started using adaptive power levels.  A typical implementation would force a device to lower its transmit power when receiving a strong signal from the AP and raise its transmit power when the AP's signal is weak. The unanswered question is, "just how vast are these ranges of transmit power levels?"  Can a smartphone or tablet go as low as half power?  10% power?  0.0001% power?  Those differences could have a major effect on a WLAN in...

No bold type introducing today's post, as I'm going to keep things short. I was doing some work last week looking at Android devices (specifically, a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2) and I noticed some very heavy probing behavior.  We were checking out the device's behavior when it moves from AP to AP, so I set a capture for the target second AP.  I did the test (things went fine, but the WiFi Analyzer app in particular seems to really make Android devices stick to their currently associated BSS) and looked at the capture. Seeing a ton of Probe Requests from the Tablet was expected.  What wasn't expected was the Android tablet probing even while associated to the first AP.  Even when the received signal was strong (in the -50 to -63 dBm range), the Android was going off channel to probe and probe excessively. At this point I'm still trying to figure out if physical motion or an app (or lack thereof) caused the probing.  One thing I am pretty confident in saying alre...

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...