802.11b Network Discovery Tools For Linux

802.11b Network Discovery Tools is a gtk tool to scan for 802.11b networks using wavelan/aironet hardware and Linux wireless extensions. It includes the ability to log coordinates of found networks from a GPS device that is NMEA-compatible, and can be linked to a serial port.

It currently logs the WAP MAC to a database, along with the frequency the AP uses and link quality info. aside from that, you can also connect a Garmin GPS receiver and snarf that data. I'm just using GPS::Garmin, which currently doesn't support NMEA, and i didn't feel like writing another NMEA library, so maybe i'll do that later. for now, you'll have to have your GPS receiver sending data in GRMN/GRMN.

To install the program, you should just have to run "make install" as root.

Just run 'perlskan', or '/usr/local/bin/perlskan' *** AS ROOT ***

i've included a small perl program called "catdb" that'll just print the contents of the database in very hard-to-read format.

To examine the db further, you can either write a program to use the PSkan::DB module to examine the database (very simple, it's just a Tie::Hash module). to iterate through the database, all you have to do is:

tie(%foo, PSkan::DB); while(($key, $data) = each %foo) { ... } untie(%foo);

it doesn't get much easier.