Detecting or Scanning for Clients

I "look after" 3 or 4 wireless networks.

Is there any utility software around that would give the status of clients currently talking to an access point?

The particular case I'd like it for is a D-Link DWL2100AP which I can access wired from a PC.

TIA,

JohnK

p.s. Sorry if this has been asked before, but I did do a scan, plus a Google, but didn't find and appropriate results.

Reply to
John F Kappler
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You have my sympathy. The ones I deal with send me some of the weirdest problems. I'm still not sure if it's the technology, the weird customers, or the weird things RF does to peoples brains.

The DWL-2100AP supports SNMP (simple network manglement protocol). In theory, you could browse the MIB tree and find the MAC addresses of the connected radios. In reality, DLink has not seen fit to release the necessary MIB database and has only partial functionality in the ASN.1 primitives. Therefore, methinks SNMP would have been the right way to do monitoring, but not with this particular device.

Some interesting SNMP stuff for wireless:

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Next best is sniffing the traffic between your access point and router. What you'll see is the un-encapsulated 802.3 ethernet packets from the clients complete with their MAC addresses and IP addresses. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of monitoring software for Windoze. This looks good.
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($40) I tend to use arpwatch (Linux) for detecting new MAC addresses, but its output is ugly and needs to be post-processed. The large system monitoring utilities (OpenView, OpenNMS, Nagios, Unicenter TNG, etc) are SNMP based, which doesn't work well on your DWL-2100AP, and are probably overkill.

Even if I would write a sniffer that provided you with a table of connected users and whatever info I could find about them, there is a limitation to sniffing between the AP and the router. If a client radio connects, I would have no way of knowing whether they are still connected other than concocting some kind of expiration timeout timer. Similarly, a user could connect, but not move any traffic, and you would not see much between the AP and router. Monitoring should really be done in the access point.

There may be a "probe" (program that sniffs traffic and reports results) for some major monitoring packages. I've used these for MRTG and RRDTool, but they don't product the output methinks you want.

Yeah, I know the problem. I often can't even find my own postings.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Yo can check tool called NetCrunch

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It show you who is currently using a connection in switch and i think that it can be used for access point, too. You can check it,there is full 30-day trial version available.

dave

Reply to
Dave

$1200 for one mangement workstation. Ouch. Methinks it would be cheaper to just buy an access point that does SNMP (Proxim, Cisco, any of the wireless switch vendors, etc).

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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