HOW DO I CAPTURE WIRELESS INFORMATION WITH MICROSOFT NETWORK MONITOR?
One of the exciting new features in NM3.1 is the ability to capture wireless network data and management packets on Vista. This new feature provides Network Monitor a useful tool for trouble shooting wireless problems. What do you mean, wireless Management packets? With the introduction of NDIS6, we now have the ability to query the OS in a standard way to receive information regarding data that is specific to wireless transmission. The first piece of info we see on wireless frames is stuff like signal strength and data rate. This is available for any wireless card that supports Native WiFi; more on that later. We now append a WiFi structure which contains the 802.11 MAC frame plus Metadata such as Signal strength. But even more exciting than that, (ok I’m a geek, but I’m guessing you may be one too! J), we can now sniff management packets. These are the cool packets that need to occur in order to find a WiFi Access Point (AP) and that the AP can send out in order to announce itself. N
