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Tip of the Month

Network Analysis Tip of the Month – November 2006

Wireless Changes on the Fly

By Jim Thor, WildPackets Professional Services

You have seen many tips in the past about using the 'right-click' capabilities in the Peeks to help you maneuver and make selections, and here is another one. This tip is more specific to wireless captures, and is very powerful and extremely helpful.

So, you are doing a capture and need to change your capture options. You know that you can go to the toolbar and click 'Capture' → 'Capture Options' and make the necessary changes, but that is somewhat time consuming.

You may also know that you can 'double-click' on the adapter in the lower right side of the window, which will bring up the Options dialog box and allow you to make the changes as well. As a note, you will notice that during a capture, you see two adapters represented at the lower right corner of the window. The upper adapter is for the Capture Options and the lower one is for Monitor Options. If you do not have your windows maximized, then they will be represented in their appropriate window.

Those ways work well for any capture, regardless of topology. But now let's focus on wireless options and how to change those even quicker.

When you are doing a wireless capture, you often want to start off by scanning all the channels, then switch to a specific channel, or even switch once in a while during a trace for some reason. So 'right-click', but this time, on the Channel section next to the Capture Adapter.

As you can see, this is the quickest way to switch channels, select a BSSID or ESSID, turn on channel scanning, or select a particular key to decrypt WEP or WPA-PSK packets. Now you can save yourself valuable time during captures, or just change the options immediately as you need to. No fuss, no hassle!