Networks Analyzed @ Netralized

Many times a lot of us who use laptops or desktop computers which are equipped with wireless network cards, have tried to scan an area for available wireless access points. We usually use the default wireless network scanner of the Windows operating system.

But is this the most efficient tool for this job?

Surely not.

There is a tool, not quite widespread, called Network Stumbler which is much more effective than the default windows scanner. The network stumbler is a wireless network scanner that supports many different chipsets of wireless network cards as Lucent, Dell True Mobile, Compaq WL 110, Elsa Airlancer and several others.

I guess that many of you are already familiar with it. For those who haven’t heard of it before let’s see why network stumbler is better than the default windows wireless scanner.

With network stumbler we get much more information for access points concerning the following:

• We learn the MAC address of access point
• We learn the SSID of access points
• We discover the number of the channel were the access point works
• We can see the speed by which the access points send and receive information
• We can learn the type of the devices that are scanned, meaning whether they are access points or computers with their network cards configured as adhoc
• Last but not least, with network stumbler we have the opportunity to see information about the quality and the strength of the signal of access points

And not to forget network stumbler is a free application and you can download it from http://www.netstumbler.com/downloads/

Till our next article stay Netralized!!!

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under General Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.