I am trying to do some wireless sniffing on my corporate network and have been battling a problem for weeks!

I am running Gentoo with kernel 2.4. I have an Orinoco Gold Card with pathed 0.13d driver. I have the monitor option under iwpriv.

When I run "iwpriv eth1 monitor 1 6" all is fine, iwconfig shows all is well. When I bring the interface up (ifconfig eth1 promisc up), iwconfig shows that my card has dropped to 2Mb/s. Is this normal?

I find that I can only see brodacast traffic and I THINK it is because my card is running at 2Mb/s so it does not see all the traffic at 11Mb/s. Does anyone agree with this theory?

Attempts to force my card to use 11Mb/s by issueing a "iwconfig eth1 rate 11M" fail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Wireless Networking and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

The speed of your wireless connection is determined by two variables: distance and electromagnetic interference.

So your card seems to be running fine.

However, if you cannot connect to the network, it may be due to settings on the routers at work. Check with someone there who manages them.

try ifdown for eth0 and ifup for wlan0 first to see if it's the laptop.

I manage the wireless infrastructure and routers!
I think you http://www.netstumbler.org/showthread.php?t=12489may have misunderstood my problem. I can actually connect to the network fine when i pass the required security parameteres to the card. I can also maintain a 11Mb/s connection from my desk. However, what I am trying to do is passively monitor the wireless traffic to see if I can crack my WEP key using various cracking tools. The problem Im having is that my laptop in monitor mode does not see the data traffic despite putting the card into monitor mode. I suspect it has something to do with my card setting itself to 2Mb/s but I could be wrong.

I have tried configuring the laptop in monitor where there are NO wireless networks and it still goes to 2Mb/s when I bring up the interface.......

Anymore ideas?

Can someone post me an ifconfig and iwconfig of a working monitor miode Orinoco Gold so I can do a compare?

Thanks.

why are you trying to break you WEP key? just to see if you can?

ill save you the trouble, you can. It doesnt matter how secure the key is, with enogh captured data, it can be cracked by the right tools.

If your really on the "keep it secure" side, figure out a policy to change your wep keys regularly, at least once a week, mabey daily if we are talking about sensitive data.