Wireless Networking Wireless networking news, publications and reviews Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Networking News, David Sifry's Sifry Alerts, Unofficial Bluetooth Weblog, Apple AirPort Weblog, Airshare, and Dewayne Hendricks' Dewayne-Net Radio Weblog Freenetworks.org, Community Wireless, WiFi SIG at Ecademy, LocustWorld and Daily Wireless cover public wireless projects. The O'Reilly Network: Wireless DevCenter and the Wireless Developer Network have news and resources for wireless application developers. More news from Ziff Davis Wireless Supersite, wireless.com, WirelessWeek.com, Spread Spectrum Scene Online, ITtoolbox Wireless, ISP-Planet - Fixed Wireless, 802.11 Planet and Broadband Wireless Exchange Online Magazine. Tom's Networking and Practically Networked have information and hardware reviews for building small wired and wireless networks. I maintain a page of Resources for Internet Security, many of which are relevant and useful for wireless networks. Public wireless hotspot lists NodeDB is a community wireless hotspot database project. WiFinder The Wi-Fi FreeSpot directory Wi-FiHotSpotList JiWire Geektools Hotspots and Geektools Geektels (geek friendly hotels). Free Wi-Fi Cafes in San Francisco and Free Berkeley Wi-Fi Cafes. BayAreaFreeFi lists free Wi-Fi locations in the Bay area. They provide WAP access, location lists for the iPod and RSS feeds. Metro FreeFi lists locations around major US metro areas. Select public wireless network projects Bay Area Wireless User Group (BAWUG) also a list of Other 802.11 Community Networks from Cliff Skolnick. The BAWUG mailing list and archives are online. The BAWUG site also hosts bsd-wireless mailing list and archives. NoCatNet is working to build a community supported 802.11b wireless network in Sonoma County, CA. They are also actively developing NoCatAuth, the centralized authentication code for sharing internet services. Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN) is dedicated to research into the development of very low cost, high bandwidth network infrastructure and applications. SFLAN is an experimental Community Wireless project in San Francisco. Here is an archive of the SFLan mailing list. Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) is a community wireless project which distributes bootable CDROMs for nodes that include automatic mesh networking. Old Colorado City Communications Wireless has the latest projects from Dave Hughes. Prototype Testing and Evaluation of Wireless Instrumentation for Ecological Research at Remote Field Locations by Wireless National Science Foundation . Elektrosmog is a Stockholm based a discussion group for public, wireless access to the Internet over non-telecom networks, such as the Wireless LAN standard IEEE 802.11b. HPWREN, the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network team is creating, demonstrating, and evaluating a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area, wireless network in San Diego county. Wireless Communications Alliance is a Silicon Valley Initiative for Radio and Optical Connectivity. PlayaNET is one of the Burning Man networks. The Dandin Group lists the latest projects from Dewayne Hendricks. Seattle Wireless is a community wireless network in Seattle, Washington. Consume the Net is a community wireless network in London. Rooftops is a discussion of community-supported, sustainable urban wireless nets for the MIT area. Canberra Wireless Network is an effort by to build a high-speed wireless network in some parts of Canberra, Australia. They use older full length Wavelan ISA cards and the antennae from old satellite dishes. E3 is "blogging the wireless freenet" from folks around Perth. They provide links to most of the wireless networking communities around Perth as well as more general news coverage. New Zealand wireless network covers centers in the north island including Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington. MosquitoNet is the Mobile Computing Group at Stanford University. SBAY Wireless Network is the South Bay/Silicon Valley Wireless Project guerrilla.net is a l0pht spinoff to create a secure wireless network around Cambridge, MA. Some additional information is at Sinister's Data Networking. Wireless software tools and utilities OpenAP is a software distribution which will create a fully 802.11b compliant wireless access point. OpenAP access points can "do multipoint to multipoint wireless bridging, while simultaneously serving 802.11b stations." Open1x is an open source implementation of IEEE 802.1x called Xsupplicant which is an EAP/TLS 802.1X client for Unix. Kismet "is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic." It will work on most Linux and Unix platforms. bsd-airtools is a package that provides a complete toolset for wireless 802.11b auditing. It contains a WEP cracking application, a netstumbler clone and a few tools for Prism2 debug modes. Most of the utilities only fully work with a Prism2 chipset based card. Aircrack "is a 802.11 WEP key cracker. It implements the so-called Fluhrer - Mantin - Shamir (FMS) attack, along with some new attacks by a talented hacker named KoreK. When enough encrypted packets have been gathered, aircrack can almost instantly recover the WEP key." It runs under Linux and Windows. AirSnort is a wireless LAN (WLAN) tool which recovers encryption keys. AirSnort operates by passively monitoring transmissions, computing the encryption key when enough packets have been gathered. AirSnort runs on Linux and uses the Prism2 chipset. Hotspotter passively monitors the network for probe request frames toidentify the preferred networks of Windows XP clients, and will compare it to a supplied list of common hotspot network names. If the probed network name matches a common hotspot name, Hotspotter will act as an access point to allow the client to authenticate and associate Wellenreiter "is a wireless network discovery and auditing tool. Prism2, Lucent, and Cisco based cards are supported. It can discover networks (BSS/IBSS), and detects ESSID broadcasting or non-broadcasting networks and their WEP capabilities and the manufacturer automatically. DHCP and ARP traffic are decoded and displayed to give you further information about the networks. An ethereal/tcpdump-compatible dumpfile and an Application savefile will be automaticly created." There are two versions for Linux, a GTK/Perl version and a newer C++ version with a QT front end for desktop and a Opie front end for Linux handhelds like the Zaurus. WepLab "is a tool designed to teach how WEP works, what different vulnerabilities has, and how they can be used in practice to break a WEP protected wireless network. So far, WepLab more than a Wep Key Cracker, is a Wep Security Analyzer designed from an educational point of view. The author has tried to leave the source code as clear as possible, running away from optimizations that would offuscate it." "Weplab works under any flavor of Linux for i386 and PPC, MacOSX and Windows NT/2000/XP." Prismstumbler is a wireless LAN (WLAN) which scans for beaconframes from accesspoints. Prismstumbler operates by constantly switching channels an monitors any frames recived on the currently selected channel. Prism stumbler uses AirSnort. WEPCrack is a tool for breaking 802.11 WEP secret keys. SNR tool helps network administrator to collect signal/noice-rate statistics from Lucent Wireless AccessPoint devices via SNMP, store it into MySQL database and view summary graphs via CGI-module. APTools is a utility for Windows and Unix that queries ARP Tables and Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) for MAC Address ranges associated with 802.11b Access Points. It will also utilize Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) if available. If a Cisco Aironet MAC Address is identified, the security configuration of the Access Point is audited via HTML parsing. The Rice Monarch Project develops protocols for adaptive mobile and wireless networking. The project was formerly hosted at CMU. KOrinoco is a KDE clone of the Lucent Orinoco client manager. Wavemon is a ncurses-based monitoring application for wireless network devices. It currently works under Linux with devices that are supported by the wireless extensions by Jean Tourrilhes (included in Kernel 2.4 and higher), e.g. the Lucent Orinoco cards. GNOME Wireless Applet is a wireless link quality monitor panel applet for GNOME. It reads the link quality out of /proc/net/wireless and reports quality by altering color, like a mood ring. Gkrellm wireless plugin monitors the signal quality of your wireless networking card (if it's driver supports the linux wireless extension api or you use Freebsd's wi0 interface) HOWTOs, documentation and other links Wireless LAN resources for Linux and Linux Wireless LAN Howto from Jean Tourrilhes. Linux Wireless Access Point HOWTO from Simon Anderson includes details on using HostAP mode, NoCat, etc. Installing and Configuring HostAP from Jason Boxman includes information on WEP, Wireless Distribution System (WDS), uploading new firmware, etc. Prism II Access Point Mini-Howto explains how to configure "PRISMII" chipset PCMCIA cards as IEEE 802.11b compliant access points for Linux. Low Cost Wireless Network How-To describes Proxim Symphony and other older 2.4GHz gear. Using a Unix computer as a 802.11 wireless base station by Ross Finlayson is a good introduction and Configuring a FreeBSD Access Point for your Wireless Network by Michael S. DeGraw-Bertsch in SysAdmin magazine provides more details. Using IEEE 802.11 WaveLAN under NetBSD documentation for wireless networking under NetBSD. Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO TuxMobile Wireless LANs Wireless LAN Security - 802.11 and Wardriving Resources Drivers and low level wireless tools Host AP driver for Intersil Prism2/2.5/3 and WPA Supplicant is a Linux driver supporting Host AP mode, BSS, ISBSS, WAP and WPA with RSN (WPA2). The Linux ORiNOCO Driver included in the kernel since 2.4.3 and in David Hinds' pcmcia-cs package since 3.1.30 supports a large number of wireless NICs based on the Prism 2 chipset. Wireless LAN Project (linux-wlan project) has drivers for cards using the Intersil PRISM chipset in their 802.11 implementation. The Linux WLAN project FAQ has more technical details. The current Linux WLAN mailing list archive. Wireless Tools for Linux from Jean_Tourrilhes can also be found as RPMs from RedHat. Linux WaveLAN/IEEE 802.11 driver is included in the latest pcmcia-cs. Host AP driver for Intersil Prism2/2.5/3 is a Linux driver that supports a Host AP mode. It takes care of IEEE 802.11 management functions in the host computer and acts as an access point. Linux PCMCIA Information Page is the home to David Hinds' pcmcia-cs package which supports a number of wireless cards. Here is the complete list of supported cards. Recent releases of all the BSDs include drivers for common wireless cards. People running older releases may find the followin information useful: FreeBSD WaveLAN drivers, ORiNOCO WaveLAN Wireless on FreeBSD and FreeBSD Aironet drivers Starmode Radio IP (STRIP) is a protocol for carrying IP packets over the "Starmode" interface of Metricom's 900MHz Ricochet packet radios. STRIP gives you a "wireless IP subnet", similar to a conventional Ethernet network, except slower (and without the wires). It currently works for Linux. Mac OS X and Airport wireless links KisMAC is a wireless stumbler for MacOS X that will detect hidden networks and put an Airport card into monitoring mode. MacStumbler is an OS X tool with functionality similar to NetStumbler. iStumbler is another NetStumbler clone WirelessDriver is an open source driver for MacOS X and Darwin which supports third party PC Cards including Prism/Prism2, WaveLAN/ORiNOCO, Cabletron, SkyLINE and D-link. IOXperts 802.11b Driver is a commercial driver supporting a range of 802.11n cards under Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. OrangeWare's Wireless Driver for Mac is a commercial driver supporting 802.11 a/b/g cards based on the Atheros chipset under Mac OS X. MAC Spoofing on the Mac is a set of patches to allow you to change your MAC address under OS X and Darwin. MacSniffer is a front end to the built-in 'tcpdump' packet sniffer on Mac OS X. Instructions for adding AirPort Base Station Antennas. Apple Airport information straight from the source. Windows and Java specific tools and utilities Net Stumbler is the original scanning utility for Windows Aerosol is easy to use wardriving software for PRISM2 Chipset, ATMEL USB and WaveLAN Wireless cards on Windows. Its lightweight, written in C and free. FreeBase is a Windows configuration tool for the Apple AirPort Base Station. It is considered to be the most functional AirPort configuration tool. The FreeBase site also has an Apple AirPort Base Station Hardware guided tour in case you interested or want to upgrade the unit with a gold card Radio Mobile for windows is a free tool to predict the performance of a radio system. KarlNet's KarlBridge software is used by both AirPort and Orinoco access points. They also provide a configuration tool which will work on a number of access points based on their software. Java-Based AirPort Base Station Configurator and Modem Utility Cross-platform AirPort Wireless Networks is a fairly detailed guide to setting up an AirPort Network. Mobile phone and Bluetooth utilities gnokii is a set of tools and a user space driver for use with mobile phones under Linux, Unix, and Windows. The tools can manipulate PIM data, SMS and provide modem drivers. BlueZ is the home for the official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. The stack has been included since the 2.4 Linux kernel. Redfang searches for non-discoverable Bluetooth devices by brute-forcing the device's Bluetooth address. btscanner "is a tool designed specifically to extract as much information as possible from a Bluetooth device without the requirement to pair. A detailed information screen extracts HCI and SDP information, and maintains an open connection to monitor the RSSI and link quality." Bluesniff is a proof of concept Bluetooth device scanning tool. It was written in Perl on Linux. Axis Linux Bluetooth software is a GPL Bluetooth driver for 2.0 and 2.2 kernels. IBM has Blutooth Transport Drivers for BlueDrekar Middleware available for Linux under the GPL. The larger BlueDrekar Middleware package is available under the Alphaworks license. Infrared and IRDA Linux-IrDA web pages (Infrared Data Association) is an industry standard for infrared wireless communication. Werner Heuser's Linux Infrared HOWTO and Infrared Devices working with Linux and Software for Mobile UniX Users and much more at TuxMobile Linux On Mobile Computers IrNET for Linux-IrDA is a protocol allowing to carry TCP/IP traffic between two IrDA peers in an efficient fashion. IR Wireless LAN/MAN Products directory Wireless LAN standards organizations IEEE P802.11, The Working Group for Wireless LANs The IEEE 802.16 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access Standards The Unofficial 802.11 Security Web Page including the 802.1x and WEP v2.0 specifications. Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) is a nonprofit organization formed in 1999 to certify interoperability of Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) for IEEE 802.11b HIPERLAN Type 2 standard specifications from ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute). HiperLAN2 Resource Center
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How WiFi Works
by Marshall Brain
Table of Contents Introduction to How WiFi Works The Walkie-Talkie Network WiFi's Radio Technology Adding WiFi to a Computer Configuring WiFi WiFi Security Setting Up a Hotspot in Your Home Configuring a New Hotspot in your Home Lots More Information! Shop or Compare Prices
If you have a network in your home or office, there are several different ways to connect the computers on your network together. The article How Home Networking Works covers all of the basic networking principles. WiFi is the wireless way to handle networking. It is also known as 802.11 networking and wireless networking. The big advantage of WiFi is its simplicity. You can connect computers anywhere in your home or office without the need for wires. The computers connect to the network using radio signals, and computers can be up to 100 feet or so apart.
In this article, we will discuss two different aspects of WiFi. First we will discuss the basic technology that makes WiFi networking possible. Then we will discuss the hardware you need to create a WiFi network, and help you understand how to set up and access a WiFi hotspot in your home.
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Lowest Price 1. Belkin Wireless (F5D7130) 802.11g/b Wireless Access Point $55 2. Cisco AIR-AP1231G-A-K9 802.11a, 802.11g/b Wireless Access Point $575 3. Linksys Wireless-G WAP54G 802.11g/b Wireless Access Point $60 4. Linksys (BEFW11S4) 802.11b Wireless Access Point $39 5. U.S. Robotics (USR5450) 802.11g/b Wireless Access Point $109
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Table of Contents: › Introduction to How WiFi Works › The Walkie-Talkie Network › WiFi's Radio Technology › Adding WiFi to a Computer › Configuring WiFi › WiFi Security › Setting Up a Hotspot in Your Home › Configuring a New Hotspot in your Home › Lots More Information! › Shop or Compare Prices
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