[HORST] - Horsts OLSR Radio Scanning Tool (or) Highly Optimized Radio Scanning Tool

see my new page http://br1.einfach.org/tech/horst

Overview

[horst] is a scanning and analysis tool for IEEE802.11 wireless networks and especially IBSS (ad-hoc) mode and the OLSR mesh routing protocol. it can be used discover the best OLSR nodes in the neighbourhood, to optimize antenna positions and to discover problems in the mesh network.

News

23.02.2007: continuing: contrary to what i said last time, i continued to work on [horst] despite of the release candidate (it's not like i got a lot of feedback anyways ;)). i switched to use select() and added networking support to make it possible to run one [horst] (with or without UI) on a remote host and connect to it from another (possibly faster) machine over the network (horst -c remotehost). the packets are still parsed on the remote horst server and sent in summary form to the client.

26.12.2007: 2.0 release candidate 1: i didn't get around to do a full 2.0 release yet but there is a release candidate 2.0-rc1, special 24C3 edition ;). i'm looking forward to your input and results and hope to be able to release 2.0 soon. no big features will be made until after that.

07.12.2007: well, in october i just wanted to merge in the patches and play with git, but it turned out to become a major update for [horst]. whereas the old release was just a quick hack put together in a few days, we have now a sane and more complete frame parsing and lot's of new features like IBSS split detection, a signal/noise history bargraph, packet type/rate statistics and more. i hope to be able to release 2.0 just in time for the 24C3 so you guys can see the annual complete wlan breakdown in more detail :)

23.10.2007: i'm working on a new version which will incorporate all patches that have been made in the mean time + a few new features like radiotap header parsing and IBSS split detection...

Description

with the usual wireless tools like iwconfig and iwspy (and even kismet) it is hard to measure the received signal strength (SNR or RSSI) for each of the *different* nodes which form an ad-hoc network, since they all treat the whole IBSS as one. this information however is very important for setting up, debugging and optimizing wireless mesh networks.

[horst] aims to fill this gap and lists each single node of an ad-hoc network seperately, showing the signal strength (SNR) of the last received packet. this way you can see which nodes are part of a specific ad-hoc cell (BSSID), discover problems with ad-hoc cell merging ("cell splitting" - a problem of many wlan drivers), which of the nodes send OLSR packets, wether they use the OLSR link quality exension, how many neighbors they see, etc.

to do this, it uses the monitor mode including prism2 or radiotap headers (for the signal strength information) of the wlan cards and listens to all packets which come in the wireless interface. these packets are scanned for OLSR traffic, summarized by the MAC address of the sending node, and displayed in a simple text (ncurses) interface.

[horst] should work with any wlan card which can do monitor mode, with either "prism2" or "radiotap" headers.

[horst] is named after Horst, a friend who took the important and hard role to convince me that such a tool is necessary and who had the persistence to ask for it for over a year.

Usage Notes

linksys WRT (broadcom driver)

to get a monitor interfaces with prism headers you have to issue this commands. 

wl -i wl0 monitor 1
horst -i prism0

madwifi

create a monitor interface with: 

wlanconfig wifi0 create wlandev mon0 wlanmode monitor
horst -i mon0

older versions of madwifi default to prism headers. radiotap headers are better, so it might be necessary to: 

echo 803 >/proc/sys/net/ath0/dev_type

Download

git clone git://br1.einfach.org/horst

horst (last edited 2010-04-20 11:20:35 by Br1)