sniffer and supported wireless cards

Dec 26, 2004 2 Replies

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Dirk V 21 years ago

I'm using a Sitecom wireless card (WL 112) on a laptop (XP) and I'm trying to get a sniffer program to work.

Unfortunately, sofar little success. Most of the available sniffer applications do not seem to recognize my wireless card. In one case, it was recognized but I was only able to see the traffic to/from my own laptop (and I used the promiscuous mode of the sniffer appl).

Any suggestions? Is my card maybe not suited for this? Should I get another card? If so, what would be a good choice?

Thanks, Dirk

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Airhead 21 years ago

I would check the supported hardware list on the sniffers site. Some have a different driver you install to make the card work,

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gary 21 years ago

This topic comes up repeatedly. The last time I checked - admittedly, several months ago - I could not find any non-commercial analyzers that worked on Windows. Commercial analyzers are expensive, but they come with drivers for Windows. Ethereal, on the other hand, uses the WinPcap library, which assumes that it can use the installed Windows drivers underneath it to put the network adapter in promiscuous mode. This is true for the Ethernet driver that comes with your Windows system. But, in general, the vendor drivers for wifi adapters do NOT provide a function to put the card in promiscuous mode. Also, the hardware interface to the adapter is usually available only to licensees who are producing commercial software.

If you find *any* non-commercial wifi analyzer that comes with a driver capable of promiscuous mode on Windows, please post.

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