Wireshark · Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Ethereal under windows

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 04:56:14AM +0200, Christian Gra� wrote:
> is it possible to use ethereal under windows to find out access points in 
> wireless LANs? or is there a problem with the windows driver model 
> (capturing raw frames of 802.11).

There's a problem with the NDIS driver model (no standard way, as far as
I know, to ask an NDIS 802.11 driver to go into monitor mode and
send/get raw 802.11 frames) and with the Windows drivers for various
802.11 cards (no documented non-standard way to do that, either).

As such, Ethereal can't do on Windows what it can do with some cards on
some free UNIXes.

However, at least from my reading of the NDIS spec a while ago, there
might be a way, using standard NDIS interfaces, to ask an 802.11 driver
to send out a probe of some sort and get the results of the probe, even
if you can't give it a probe packet and see the raw packets it got back.
That might be what NetStumbler:

	http://www.netstumbler.com/

does; that tool might be able to find access points.