Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Re: No 802.11?? on Linux Version??

Note: This archive is from the project's previous web site, ethereal.com. This list is no longer active.

Date Index Thread Index Other Months All Mailing Lists
Date Prev Date Next Thread Prev Thread Next
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2002 11:28:42 -0700
On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 08:40:09AM -0700, Doug Cabell wrote:
> I FINALLY got the thing to run, the capture dialog box is physically too
> big,

Too big for what?

> but its running. Anyway, I thought the Linux version would decode
> 802.11, but I don't see anything that I don't see with the NT version. Whats
> up??

*All* versions of Ethereal will *decode* 802.11.

The question is whether they can *capture* raw 802.11 frames, which
depends mainly on the OS on which you're running Ethereal.

On Windows, the drivers don't provide a way to get raw 802.11 frames
through NDIS, and NDIS is the mechanism WinPcap uses to plug into the
network drivers.  I suspect the standard drivers on Windows on't provide
any way to get raw 802.11 frames at all.

On Linux and FreeBSD, some drivers do provide a way to capture raw
802.11 frames; at least some of the drivers require you to put the
adapter into a special mode to do that, however.

See

	http://www.ethereal.com/faq.html#q5.22

(I don't know whether there are special commands needed to capture raw
802.11 frames with adapters handled by the linux-wlan-ng Prism II
driver, nor, if there are, what those commands are.)