On Feb 10, 2004, at 2:05 AM, Pablo wrote:
i'm trying to capture 802.11 packets with ethereal.
On what operating system?
I have seen in the ethereal's faqs that i have to turn promiscous
mode off.
What you probably saw was
http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.37
or
http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.38
both of which speak of Windows. You do *not* necessarily have to turn
promiscuous mode off; some cards' drivers on Windows might not have the
problem mentioned in those FAQs, and those problems might not exist on
other OSes such as Linux or {Free,Net,Open}BSD or Mac OS X.
In that case, i have tested and i have captured
wireless packets that i have sent or received.
But my target is to evaluate my own wireless network
security and i need to capture third-party traffic. I want
to know if it is possible to do this with ethereal.
It's possible with Ethereal if, and only if, it's possible with the
802.11 card, 802.11 driver, and OS you have. I don't know which cards,
OSes, and drivers support promiscuous mode; you'll have to try
capturing in promiscuous mode yourself - if it doesn't work, you will
probably have to change cards or OSes; I don't know what cards to
recommend, but for OSes I'd recommend, for an x86 machine, recent
Linuxes or BSDs.
I have read in other forum that i have to use a libpcap patched
That depends on the OS. There are no patches required, and there are
no patches that help, on Windows.