Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Wireless: Ethereal vs. Sniffer Pro Question

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 15:15:26 -0700

On Sep 19, 2003, at 3:18 AM, Andrew Lacey wrote:
I then have XP2 running Sniffer Pro on the wireless adaptor. It is able to capture the traffic of XP1 pinging AP. Which is good this enables me to find what network the AP and XP1 are on.
Question: When I do the same test with Ethereal (my preferred program). It is not able to see this traffic. 
Could anybody explain why,
Because Ethereal relies on WinPcap to do capturing, and because WinPcap relies on the driver to let it capture "third-party" traffic, and because the driver you have for your wireless adapter either doesn't support that kind of capture ("promiscuous" or "monitor mode") at all, or it's one of Network Associates' drivers which does support it, but probably does so using some special private mechanism that only Sniffer Pro knows about.