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Group,

I am really tryiing to understand what the special drivers are needed for, in reference to installing a wireless analyzer on my network?

What advantages do they have over regular drivers?

Promiscious mode means what, simply just not sending out traffic, but can still sniff the air?

Please feel free to give me some details on this, as I am trying to ramp up understanding real world scenarios.

Steve

In the Ethernet realm the hardware is designed to filter on MAC addresses and only pass up the stack those frames that are of interest to the station and its applications. This includes the unique unicast address of the station, the broadcast address, and multicast addresses for all multicast groups joined by the station. Shifting to promiscuous mode causes all received frames to be passed up the stack as would be needed by an Ethernet protocol analysis application.

In the Wi-Fi realm the hardware is designed to source and sink many control and management frames, as well as to filter on MAC addresses, and only pass up the stack those data frames that are of interest to the station and its applications. Shifting to promiscuous mode causes all received frames to be passed up the stack as would be needed by a Wi-Fi protocol analysis application.

Sometimes special drivers can also pass up the stack frame fragments and otherwise corrupted frames that normally would be discarded by the hardware.

Some frame features are never passed up the stack but of necessity are sourced and sunk by the hardware. An example for both Ethernet and Wi-Fi is the frame preamble.

I hope this helps. Thanks. /criss