wireshark- cannot bind to the wireless card
 

i have a dell d600 with ubuntu and a cisco 350 wireless aironet card. i am running wireshark - and it will not bind to my wireless card.
it will not see the card on interface options. on capture --> options there is no wireless card listed in the interface.

Most likely this means the wireless card's kernel module is not loaded. Wireshark cannot communicate directly with the wireless adaptor, but only as a configured network device like wlan0 or eth1.

First, look at the output of "iwconfig". See if your wireless adaptor is listed. If it is, this means it is configured but not necessarily enabled -- but this would be a good place to start troubleshooting.

This sounds like a permissions issue. Try opening a terminal and running it from the command line...

sudo wireshark

If that works, you've found your problem.

Mike

Whoops - wireshark is not optimized for scanning wireless network traffic, a better tool to use is KISMET. There are some issues surrounding the use of cisco 350 aironet cards with KISMET - the card does not easily enter monitor mode. I bought the card that they use in the setup tutorial for 5 dollars on ebay. I will keep every posted on how KISMET works with laptops.
Thanks Guys.