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Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] Re: urgent (help needed)

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 13:19:25 -0700
rupesh gautam wrote:

I have captured data in promiscuous mode ( airnonet card with fedora )
but i am unable to recognize packets between wired ethernet and
wireless(because ethreal captures data from both wired and wireless in promiscuous mode)....

The only way Ethereal - or any *other* libpcap-based application - will capture data from a wired Ethernet is if

	1) you told it to capture on a wired Ethernet adapter, e.g. eth0 on Linux;

2) this is on Linux (which, on this case, it is) and you're capturing on the "any" device;

3) there's a bug in your OS and if you capture on one interface with libpcap it also supplies packets from other OSes.

how can we recognize that??? in my data ethereal shows only Ethernet II type........

If your capture shows "Ethernet II" rather than "Linux cooked" or whatever I called it, you're not capturing on the "any" device, so that leaves 1) or 3).

3) is, I suspect, unlikely, so if you're seeing packets that you know are being captured from the wired Ethernet adapter, it's almost certainly because you told Ethereal to capture on that adapter.

However, if you did that, you won't see packets from the Aironet adapter unless you told it to capture on that (for the same 3 reasons that apply to traffic from a wired adapter).

So why do you think it's capturing data from a wired Ethernet? Is that because the wired Ethernet packets are being bridged to the wireless network by an access point that's also plugged into a wired Ethernet? If so, then there really isn't any difference between those packets and packets that were sent on the wireless network by a host on that network rather than an access point, other than the source MAC address - they're both transmitted on the wireless network as 802.11 packets, without any special "this is bridged" flag (as far as I know, at least).

If you want to distinguish between packets sent by hosts on the wireless network and packets bridged onto the wireless network by an access point, you might be able to do it by enabling address resolution for MAC addresses (if it's not enabled already) and guessing based on the manufacturer name.

what is this Ethernet II type...is it 802.3 or 802.11.............

Not 802.11. As I said in my earlier mail, the adapter, or the driver - probably the adapter (as configured by the driver) - is replacing the 802.11 header with an Ethernet header. I suspect it's possible to configure the adapter to supply 802.11 headers regardless of whether the adapter is in monitor mode or not (it's been a while since I looked at the FreeBSD Aironet driver, but I think that's possible), but the Linux driver might not support that.

The term "Ethernet II" often refers to Ethernet frames in which the 16-bit type/length field contains a packet type, and the term "802.3" often refers to Ethernet frames in which it contains a packet length, even though the IEEE 802.3 standard supports both.