Step 1: Since the sniffing device, client device and AP are all using RF generating radios for transmission or reception, it helps to have your wireless sniffer close to your target device (the client machine). With Wireless sniffing it helps to have an idea of what you are really trying to do - you are trying to capture the raw wireless frames from over the air, as seen by the wireless sniffing device itself. But there are a few things to bear in mind that will help simplify and speed up this process. Packet Peeper is available for download here, take it for a spin.The process of collecting a good wireless sniffer trace, in order to analyze and troubleshoot 802.11 behavior, can be a difficult and time consuming operation. As you get more into packet sniffing, you’ll find them quite useful.

It has been scaled to fit into this page but, as you can see, it can be expanded to give you more info on the same screen.Īs options go, there are several that can be setup before a capture session is initiated. The image above depicts the viewing of a packet in a separate window. The image above shows what a TCP stream looks like.Īnalyzing a packet is easy when you have enough room. This is particularly useful if you have to analyze traffic from several networks at once and want to do it later, after all the capturing has been done. For example, if you check your POP e-mail account that sends the username and password in plain text to the server you’ll see that Packet Peeper has captured them both:Ĭaptured traffic can be saved for later analysis. After all, you may not be the only one with such a tool. Watching how this tool captures your network traffic will make you think twice at what you do the next time you’re connected to one of those free hotspots. If you fire up Packet Peeper and opt for promiscuous capture mode, you can see not just your packets, but also those addressed to the rest of the coffee drinking surfers.Īs you can see from the screenshot above, Packet Peeper’s interface is very simple and easy to use. Nowadays it’s very common to be in the local coffee shop, connected to an open wireless network while having a hot cup of java. There are many tools up for the job that work on Mac OS X but if you’re looking for a free packet sniffer, Packet Peeper is an open source project that does the job quite well. New users may be asking themselves why would they need such a tool so here are a few things it allows you to do: If you have more than one workstation, you administer several machines connected to a network, or just frequently connect to various networks, sooner or later you’ll find a packet sniffer to be quite useful.

Mac packet sniffer