I have a wireless router attacted to a clearwire modem. My desktop plugs into one of the hardwired ports, and I (rarely) use the wifi to connect with my laptop in another room. I recently had someone attached to my network who wasn't supposed to be (I enabled none of the security options while doing some troubleshooting) Just for fun, I broke out a copy of backtrace and tried to monitor the sites this vampire user was surfing using driftnet. I ran driftnet from my desktop and it could not 'see' any of the activity on the wireless connections. Is there a way that these security tools can be used to monitor wireless connections to my network? I have enabled security which prevents the connections, but I think I know who is using my network and why (he has his own internet connection) and I'd like to point out to him that pirating my connections isn't a good idea.

The router probably works like a switch rather than a hub. I'm not familiar with driftnet. Your router may be able to log outgoing and incoming connections. This would give you a table of IP addresses.

I figured that the router was passing wireless requests along to the modem without putting them on the cable so eth0 could see them, so I went out and bought a hub. I connected the hub to the modem, router, and desktop hoping that that would put all access to the modem where the desktop's nic could see them. It didn't work. I still can't see the wireless requests. Did notice something odd though. when I started driftnet on the desktop it will see what the desktop is doing. With the -v (verbose) switch set there is activity when the desktop surfs, but not when my wireless laptop surfs. I started wireshark and driftnet started registering <something> when the laptop was surfing. with the desktop I'd get ip address info, and the names of jpeg images. Surfing with the laptop I'd just get the addresses and dots (.......) while images were being displayed.

at the moment these difficulties appear to apply to wireshark too. I can't see any activity with wireshark when I"m surfing with the laptop.