i have a couple computers in my apartment that connect via DHCP over wireless. both have wireless cards, one of which runs in AP mode (thanks to hostap 0.0.4) and routes for the other computer. i'm interested in probing the wireless networks in my apartment building to see what's out there, so i downloaded and installed kismet.

the installation went fine, but i can't get kismet to run, as it keeps giving me grief about the packet buffer being empty:

Source origami: Created child capture process 4719
FATAL: capture child 4719 packet buffer empty and flagged as diseased, exiting

my question is "does kismet even work with my pci wireless card (i have a netgear MA311) ?"

other outputs that occur when i run kismet_monitor followed by kismet_server lead me to believe this:

Source 0 (origami): Attempting to enter monitor mode.
Enabling monitor mode for an orinoco card on eth0 channel 6
Invalid command : monitor
Source origami: Created child capture process 4752
FATAL: capture child 4752 (origami): pcap reported netlink type 1 (EN10MB) for eth0. This probably means you're not in RFMON mode or your drivers are reporting a bad value. Make sure you have run kismet_monitor.
FATAL: capture child 4752 packet buffer empty and flagged as diseased, exiting

my suspicion is that something is wrong with the drivers, but i use the orinoco_pci driver and i chose to use the "orinoco" card type in the kismet.conf file.

any suggestions are welcome.

thx for reading,
y-p