Wi-Fi Monitoring Approach From 2009 Still Works

Four years ago I put down my notes in a blog post on how to use Ubuntu on a notebook to trace Wi-Fi in combination with Wireshark so I could see the Wi-Fi management frames and also the Wi-Fi portion of each Ethernet frame. Amazingly enough, it still works the same way as it did four years ago so I thought I'd write a quick post and link to the original entry as information about how this is done is not widespread. So here's link to the original post.

Tracing this way is a bit more complicated than the approach with the mini-Wi-Fi-Access point that backhauls its traffic via Ethernet as described in this post from back in November. However, this approach is only good for tracing Ethernet frames and gives no insight into the wireless part. But sometimes that is not necessary anyway, it really depends on what one is looking for.