How to monitor wireless traffic?

English Network/Internet
#1

I am currently using a Thinkpad and a EEE side by side, both connected to the same wireless router.

Wanted to learn how to monitor wireless traffic.
Have been reading/googling and installed wireshark/tcpdump in the Thinkpad to monitor the wireless activity on my EEE.

However, all I can see is my Thinkpad’s own traffic and none of my EEE’s traffic (even if both are going to the same site).

Any experts here kind enough to point my to the right direction?

:slight_smile:

#2

At a rough guess, I’d say the only way to monitor it is by having all the traffic from the router going through one gateway, which implies only one connection to the wireless router. Installing somthing on the thinkpad only logs the traffic for the thinkpad’s wireless.
This means the wirelesss router is being used as an access point.
Unless you can get something running on the router.
Does the router have any intelligence to add logs? (Some can be changed to run linux - just search for the router on google or some such)

#3

You are right about the router is being used as an access point. Unfortunately the router is a “touch me not” keep of box provided by the local ISP.

However, was thinking that for a wired network, wireshark is able to let me monitor the network.

So for a wireless network, there must be a way to do a similar thing.

#4

Hey, have you tested KNEMO yet? :wink:

#5

Oops, think I may have lead you to the wrong direction.

When I say monitor, what I meant was wanted to learn how to see/track/watch the traffic on my network.
Meaning when on my Thinkpad, I would want to see ALL wireless traffic flowing through my network, both from my Thinkpad and my EEE.

KNEMO - if I don’t understand wrong, does not support this :slight_smile:

#6

You can easily do this by putting your wireless nick in monitor mode. If you are unsure of how to do this, installing aircrack is the easiest way depending on hardware.

airmon-ng start wlan0