Wardriving |
Jeff Duntemann's
Wardriving FAQ |
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Part V: The Practice of WardrivingFAQ: | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | |
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| What wardriving approach gathers the most stations? | |
Easy: Go slow and stay off the superhighways. Consensus is that a speed of about 35 MPH is ideal for wardriving. Stumbler programs need some time to work, and if you roar past at 80, the more distant stations will not be within range long enough for the stumbler software to log them. My experiments also show that if you spend most of your wardriving time on limited access highways, you'll miss stations compared to driving on surface streets. On a superhighway you typically go faster (unless you're in LA, I guess) than surface streets, and you're also farther away from buildings where the APs are and will thus miss more of them. Note well that Kismet is much slower to scan the full 802.11b channel space than NetStumbler, so if you're wardriving with Kismet it's even more important not to scream down the street at 75 MPH. Kismet, being fully passive, has to take time to listen for APs; NetStumbler, on the other hand, emits 802.11b probes frequently to speed of the process of AP discovery. |
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| How can I make sure I've logged every station in my area? | |
| It's all about planning and record-keeping. Do what I do: Get a street map of the area, and block it out into sectors with a highlighter. Then, starting with one of the sectors, go up and down every last street shown on the map within that sector, and highlight the street as you stumble it. Repeat for each of the sectors. This approach guarantees that you won't miss anything within a given sector, and has an additional benefit: Logging a station from several different directions (as you stumble nearby side streets) allows mapping systems like WiGLE and WiFiMaps to triangulate an AP's precise position and/or coverage area. (More on WiGLE and WiFiMaps later in this FAQ.) This, of course, assumes you have GPS data coming in while you wardrive. | |
| What is a "standard wardrive?" | |
| This is my term for defining a route
and then wardriving it on a regular basis (say, weekly or monthly) and keeping
the logs for each drive so you can track the changes in the Wi-Fi network
installed base over time. The easiest way to do this is use your daily commute,
if it takes you past enough stations to be useful. If not, then simply pull
out a map and choose a route that will net you at least fifty stations,
the more the better for statistical usefulness. Each time you stumble your
standard route, save the log file with a name that includes the date and
the name of the route taken. (I have three standard wardrives.) By all means
merge your logs into a master logfile containing all your stumbled stations
from all routes and runs, but keep separate copies as well for analysis.
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FAQ: | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | )( © Copyright 2006 All rights
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