Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] sniffing on WLAN using prism chip set

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:30:54 -0700
akshar SNIFFER wrote:
  I wanted to do packet sniffing on WLAN on linux  , I have a prism chip set .
I wanted to ask what input i am suppose to give in the interface option in EDIT menu .

Edit menu? The only place in Ethereal where you give an interface option for something in the Edit menu is in the capture preferences in Edit -> Preferences - and you'd only do that if you want to change the *default* interface.

The interface you'd put there would be the same as the interface you'd put in the capture dialog box for Capture -> Start. That would be the name that "ifconfig" reports for that interface.

Note that if you want to capture non-data frames (such as management frames), or frames for networks other than the one with which the WLAN interface is associated, you would have to capture in monitor mode. See

	http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.38

for information on monitor mode in Linux, and note that an interface in monitor mode is, for many WLAN interfaces, *NOT* an active participant in *ANY* network - if that's the case (and it probably is; I don't know for which interfaces, if any, it's *not* true), then you will probably not, for example, be able to run Ethereal in a mode where it translates IP addresses to names (as it'll probably try to do DNS queries to do that, but if it's not on any network those queries will probably block Ethereal from doing any work until they time out).