Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [Wireshark-commits] rev 38261: /trunk/ /trunk/: configure.in
Date Index · Thread Index · Other Months · All Mailing Lists
Date Prev · Date Next · Thread Prev · Thread Next
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 13:07:04 -0700
On Aug 2, 2011, at 2:33 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

> 
> On Aug 2, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Stig Bjørlykke wrote:
> 
>> Are you sure?  Isn't this for (some) regular wireless adapters on Windows?
>> I'm not getting any information from my AirPcap...
> 
> WinPcap doesn't support NDIS 6.0, so it doesn't support the "native Wi-Fi" stuf that was introduced in Vista, so it only supports 802.11 interfaces as "fake Ethernet" interfaces - and the drivers for a lot of them don't work very well in that mode, e.g. some of them fail to capture any traffic at all when you ask the driver to put the card in promiscuous mode.  No monitor mode support at all.

OK, I checked the code, and you're right - on Windows, the "interface list" dialog fetches a bunch of statistics from NDIS and displays them; this includes the data rate and RSSI on 802.11 interfaces.  That, unlike useful capturing, doesn't require NDIS 6.

In theory, similar stuff could probably be done on at least some UN*X platforms; that sounds like a job for Another libpcap/WinPcap API.