I've recently begun exploring the capabilities that can be found in the WLAN Pi. The WLAN Pi is a compact network tool designed to test wired-wired, wired-wireless and wireless-wireless networks. The tools that you get in such a small and portable size are great for quick troubleshooting and analysis. The small size makes it ultra portable so it's very easy to pack around full time when you might not be able to do that with other tools. For full details on the hardware setup head over to WLANPI.com
Under the hood the WLAN Pi currently comes installed with a number of tools including:
Iperf3 server 3.1.3
Iperf2 server 2.0.9
ZAPd (Ruckus) daemon 1.83.18
Ekahau eperf
Speed Tests (HTML5)
Kismet Dev build
WiFi Explorer Pro Sensor Works with WiFi Explorer Pro (macOS only)
H.O.R.S.T - Live Wi-Fi packet analysis
TCPDump - common packet analyzer that runs under the command line
HOSTAPD - IEEE 802.11 AP and IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS Authenticator
Apps like Speed Test, Speed Graph, Kismet and Kismet Mobile are GUI accessible and utilize a simple one button start to run operation.
Speed Test
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| Kismet Wired Speed Test |
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| Kismet Wireless Speed Test |
Speed Graph
Kismet offers more than simple push button operation. From the Release Notes:
Kismet is a wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet works predominantly with Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) networks, but can be expanded via plug-ins to handle other network types.
● 802.11 sniffing
● Standard PCAP logging (compatible with Wireshark, TCPDump, etc)
● Client/Server modular architecture
● Plug-in architecture to expand core features
● Multiple capture source support
● Live export of packets to other tools via tun/tap virtual interfaces
● Distributed remote sniffing via lightweight remote capture
Kismet's scanning utility wifi network summary will list the MAC address/SSID, signal strength, channel, number of detected clients, occupied channels, among other information.
Drilling down into the details:
From the Release Notes: “horst” is a small, lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer with a text interface. Its basic function is similar to tcpdump, Wireshark or Kismet, but it’s much smaller and shows different, aggregated information which is not easily available from other tools. It is mainly targeted at debugging wireless LANs with a focus on ad-hoc (IBSS) mode in larger mesh networks. It can be useful to get a quick overview of what’s going on on all wireless LAN channels and to identify problems.
Features:
● Shows signal (RSSI) values per station
● Calculates channel utilization (“usage”) by adding up the amount of time the packets actually occupy the medium
● “Spectrum Analyzer” shows signal levels and usage per channel
● Graphical packet history, with signal, packet type and physical rate
● Shows all stations per ESSID and the live TSF per node as it is counting
● Detects IBSS “splits” (same ESSID but different BSSID – this is a common driver problem)
● Statistics of packets/bytes per physical rate and per packet type
● Has some support for mesh protocols (OLSR and batman)
● Can filter specific packet types, source addresses or BSSIDs
● Client/server support for monitoring on remote nodes
More details: https://github.com/br101/horst
Developer: Bruno Randolf - @spiralsun69
