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Capture wireless traffic

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I work at the IT support desk in a company that serves the food supply chain industry. Given the nature of our business, we have warehouse workers using various wireless devices for receiving and putting away product, as well as picking product to fill orders and loading trucks for shipment to retailers.

These wireless devices have their own subnet, and there are issues that arise from time to time. One of my responsibilities is to eliminate any other root causes before contacting a network admin to examine access point issues.

I have Wireshark installed on my laptop, and am fairly proficient in capturing ethernet traffic on my own device.

What I'm wondering is if there is a way that I can capture the traffic between the wireless devices, the access points, and - in some cases - the wireless controller (some warehouses still have autonomous APs.)

Each of our facilities have terminal servers where Wireshark is or can be installed; does anyone know how I could capture the wireless traffic at the various facilities, this either from my laptop, or via one of the facility servers?

darhicks1970's avatar
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darhicks1970
asked 2020-12-24 04:06:11 +0000
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Depending on your wireless solution there might be already a build-in capture function on your APs.

JasMan's avatar JasMan (2020-12-29 11:08:44 +0000) edit
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You have a couple of choices:

  • Attempt captures of the wireless traffic, not the easiest thing in the world, see the wiki page on WLAN capture.
  • Capture the traffic at a convenient point between the AP's and the eventual traffic destination, this will be normal Ethernet traffic.

If you're just interested in the data then the latter capture method is likely to be easier, but if you want the nitty gritty wireless details, e.g. signal strength etc., then you'll need to capture the wireless traffic.

grahamb's avatar
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grahamb
answered 2020-12-24 10:36:29 +0000
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