If you run a wireless network and Linux, Kismet is a tool you must have.

More than just a wireless sniffer, Kismet will let you list all access points in range and what channel they are running on. That's great information to have when you're deciding what channel to set your wireless access point to.

Configuring Kismet may seem a bit confusing at first, but there's really only one line you need to change in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf

source=iwl4965,wlan0,iwl4965

That's driver,device,name - I believe the name is arbitrary and can be set to anything, but I set mine to the same as the driver.

This line sets the source for packets. I found the iwl4965 (my wireless card driver) through a couple of steps.

Using the following command:

dmesg | grep Wireless

I was able to determine that I was running the Intel 4965 wireless chipset. From there, I simply looked on the Kismet website to find that iwl4965 was the correct driver name. Note I did not find this information in my lsmod results.

After adding the appropriate line to the /etc/kismet/kismet.conf file, simply run:

sudo kismet

That will start both the server and client and log the client into the server. While running, I was unable to do normal wireless activity, and actually had to reboot or use the wireless button on my laptop to cycle the wireless state before the wireless would work properly again.

Once Kismet has started, press "q" to close the help screen, arrow down to any access point and press "i" to get more information about the network.

Check the channels of all the other access points in range and make sure your access point won't conflict. The only channels that don't overlap are 1, 6 and 11. In my case, my two neighbors are using 1 and 6 so I chose 11.

Kismet can do much more than this, and is a great analysis tool. It will track rogue MAC addresses that are probing your network, allow you to integrate with WEP security programs and much more.

I've confirmed that the new Wii is what is causing my Zoom X6 wireless router to lose all wireless functionality. We went all day without the Asus EEE PC even being turned on and the wireless router still died.

I've tried everything including a firmware upgrade on the router to no avail. Next step: disable the wireless in the router and get a secondary wireless access point.

So Christmas added two new wireless devices to my network, a Nintendo Wii and an Asus EEE PC running Linux.

Ever since then I've been having constant problems. The real problem is that nearly every time is a different problem!

I've upgraded the firmware my wireless modem, tweaked settings, switched everyone over to static IP's, changed the channel, changed the mode from B+G to MIXED_LONG and back, all to no avail. This time the entire wireless stopped - things would get a signal, but couldn't ping each other afterwards. I had to reset the modem. Before that, the wireless in the EEE PC had been turned off. Before that, the wireless had switched to channel 11, but the EEE PC was fixed to channel 8 only.

Things have actually gotten worse. After upgrading the firmware on my Zoom X6, now it's internal DNS server doesn't respond anymore, so I went around and gave every device my ISP's DNS servers to solve that. About 20 minutes later is when all wireless devices stopped and I had to reset the Zoom.

I think it's time for a new router...

On a whim I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 on my Acer Aspire 5920 laptop. Mostly it went smooth but I had two problems.

First, Macromedia wouldn't respond when it tried to download the Flash plugin. Unfortunately the installer wouldn't give up and after 19 automatic retries to connect to fpdownload.macromedia.com (each taking 3 minutes) I finally hit CTRL-C and killed it. After the upgrade I had to open a console and "sudo dpkg --configure -a" to finish the setup and then reboot. What's weird is that Flash still worked after the failed install.

Upon reboot, my wireless wouldn't work. The network manager applet wouldn't even show in the panel. Doing ifconfig from a console showed the wlan0 device but nothing would bring it online. I fished my 30' long network cable out of the closet that I use for these circumstances and hardwired my laptop to the router.

A little research found that some people having this problem manually downloaded linux-firmware from the repositories and reinstalled it. After download, from within the directory where the .deb file is located simply do:

dpkg --install linux-firmware*

After that, I rebooted and my wireless asked for my wep password again. All is well in the world.