Discovering and analyzing wireless networks requires a lot of sniffing and stumbling. Eric Geier shows how to stumble and sniff with Linux.

In this third and final installment of how to survey the airwaves with Linux tools, Eric Geier shows us more tools for network surveying and discovery, deep snooping, and intrusion detection and alerting.

Today we're going to explore the fine fun world of network discovery and find out who is on our network without ever leaving our comfortable chairs.

Kismet is a 802.11b wireless network sniffer. It is capable of sniffing using almost any supported wireless card using the Airo, HostAP, Wlan-NG, and Orinoco (with a kernel patch) drivers.

Wireshark is a very versatile utility to monitor all the neighborhood network activity, including disassembling packets and viewing data transmitted from anyone who is connected on your LAN (or Wireless LAN). I'm using Wireshark to monitor the activity of the network, and I explained the packets transmitted between the peers.

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer (or "packet sniffer") that can be used for network analysis, troubleshooting, software development, education, etc. This guide shows how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 desktop to analyze the traffic on the local network card.

Any time I need network analysis I turn to Wireshark. Wireshark is, in my opinion, the defacto standard for network protocol analyzers. Not only is it incredibly powerful, useful, and user-friendly it is also FREE!

WireShark is free software that sniffs packets on wireless networks. Learn tips on configuring and using this tool when analyzing and troubleshooting 802.11 wireless networks.

Mesh networks are a type of wireless network. As you'll discover, mesh networking is great for blanketing Wi-Fi in larger areas. They are especially useful in places where the environment changes frequently, such as people and walls moving around in malls, trees and buildings growing around an apartment complex, boats moving around the docks, and trucks coming in and out of stops.