Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] why i receive only packets to and from my machine in wlan

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 09:33:38 -0700
jiang aimme wrote:
i used ethereal to capture wireless packets in red hat 9.0,i have used "ifconfig wl promisc" and set my wlan card in promiscuous mode.

Ethereal will do that for you - in fact, *by default* it puts the adapter in promiscuous mode (assuming the adapter supports promiscuous mode).

but why i receive only  packets to and from my machine .

Perhaps your wireless adapter - or the Linux driver that RH 9.0 is using - doesn't support promiscuous mode. Ask Red Hat about that.

For a wireless adapter, "promiscuous mode" seems to means "show me all traffic received by the adapter's radio that's traffic on the network with which the machine is associated". It will not, I think, capture other traffic; you might have to go into monitor mode for that; see

	http://wiki.ethereal.com/CaptureSetup_2fWLAN

for information on capturing on 802.11 networks, and see

	http://wiki.ethereal.com/CaptureSetup_2fWLAN#head-83ad8510bbd3f22363d068e1c96f82fd0fcccd31

for details on putting the adapter into monitor mode on Linux.

Note that putting the adapter into monitor mode might cause it not to be associated with a network, in which case the machine doing the capturing won't be able to use the wireless network while it's capturing in monitor mode. This refers to *any* use of the network - including doing IP-address-to-name lookups with DNS or NIS or... - so, if you put the adapter into monitor mode, you might have to disable IP-address-to-name lookups in order to prevent Ethereal from hanging.