What program to use for surveying wireless network?

[Oceanwatcher]

I have a friend that has bought a hotel and I will help him getting the network in order including the wireless part of it.

As I have just evicted Windows from my laptop and now run a clean Kubuntu installation, I need a few tips on applications for chacking out wireless networks.

One application I really LOVE for general network mapping is Intermapper:

http://www.intermapper.com/

I wish there was an open source application like that!

I use Zenmap - it is a little bit like Look@lan - another program I like a lot. There is a successor for Look@lan called Fing, but they do not have any GUI for it yet.

For this kind of job I would have used NetStumbler on Windows. Does anyone know of anything similar?

It needs to be able to show as much information about the network as possible - signal strength, channels etc.

[GreyGeek]

Re: What program to use for surveying wireless network?

You might want to try wireshark for medium level network monitoring.

For high powered work use Synaptic and install Nagios3 and what ever addtional plugins you deem necessary for your needs.

[NeverwherE]

Re: What program to use for surveying wireless network?

Personally, if I wanted to study the wireless networks around me in, say like a hotel, (ok first of all, you should see the wireless networks around you via the knetworkmanager, but) I would use aircrack-ng. This would give me an idea on how close they are and what kind of signal strength. Not to mention the other things you can do with it. However there isn't a GUI for aircrack-ng the commands are easy to find on the net, and is a decent tool for me to do wireless network sniffing.

[oshunluvr]

Re: What program to use for surveying wireless network?

You might look into Kismet for sniffing and tcpdump for packet analysis and capture.

[GreyGeek]

Re: What program to use for surveying wireless network?

Kismet is nice.
You can pick an access point and see how many other PCs are attached to it. All the ACs around me, I found out, are running Windows. About half of them had other PCs in their network. Low hanging fruit. It was easy to see why so many Windows boxes get owned.

The alert feature is nice, too.
I tried it out a month ago. I hadn't done any monitoring of who was trying to jimmy my back door in a few years. I was getting probes of various kinds about every 5 or 10 seconds.