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

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.