When I recently wanted to do a quick Wi-Fi Layer 2 trace on a machine running Ubuntu 15.10 I couldn’t get it working anymore. I was quite surprised because I’ve used this machine many times before for the purpose. Grudgingly I started to investigate…
The process of activating a monitor interface and using it is actually quite simple and I’ve described it back in 2009 (!) in this post. Over the years the approach has served me well but no matter what I tried in Ubuntu 15.10 this time I couldn’t get it working anymore. Finally, I booted the machine with Ubuntu 14.04 via a USB stick and voila, the commands worked as they should. In other words, somewhere between Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10 that functionality was for some reason or other removed somewhere. Too bad. For the moment I don’t mind as booting from a USB stick to an older Ubuntu version works fine. But 14.04 won’t live forever…
If you know of a different way to activate Layer 2 trace mode on WiFi in recent versions of Ubuntu, please let me know, I’m highly interested!