Dumali

“Angry IP scanner” is program that watches ports, and can scan IP addresses. It can be configured to scan a given range and and a selection of ports, or you can turn it loose and see what it finds.

By comparison, the binary is small when you also examine port scanners, which is nice if you are working from a machine with low resources. The scanner pings the IP addresses you tell it to and upon a response will gather information, port scans, MAC addresses, hostnames. There are plugins available to gather even more information.

It can even tell you who is logged in on a remote machine. You can save the results to any number of formats from HTML to CSV.

It is Open Source so anyone who can code can further extend its functionality.

If you examine the history of personal computer and network development you will see it didn’t garner much attention and it was a strictly nerd thing until someone decided to start connecting the machines together. Then it gained alot of attention form enthusiastic people, both developers and explorers.

So its fitting to cover what i feel are the best tools with regards to exploring and learning about the network that connects to your machines and the ones that you connect to.

Theres all kinds of tools to manipulate and understand the data flowing through your wires. And while I intend this blog to encompass so much more than technology, technology is my current passion so it makes sense that I am writing about it.

Most tools i will discuss are built with a GUI and I go with these because they are simple for folks who are learning to understand, I feel that you get more power from command line tools, but these are more difficult for the beginner.

Now for the king of all things wireless, DD-WRT. DD-WRT allows you to put in a new control panel. a Control panel that lets you have almost complete control over your wireless device, in fact this can be used to turn your wireless router into a wifi repeater.

This kind of creative thought and unrivaled coding is not a product of Microsoft! This is a Linux technology. If it works well, its Linux.
Installing DD-WRT will unlock tons of configurations options you never knew existed before, and obviously your routers creator did not want you to have. Now your can make your router fast, and secure and to do things beyond its intended purpose. Get brave, get DD-WRT installed.

It is possible to get a stronger signal using tinfoil, because the tinfoil will rflect the signal into a direction that you want it to and not let it disperse into an unneeded direction. Busting out the Reynold’d wrap will be significant in this case.

Its a very cheap and very effective method to fix a problem that would normally require a comparatively expensive high decibel booster antenna, of course to even make use of the expensive booster antenna you would need to have a router that had removable antenna’s to begin with.

Foil gets around these obstacles. Your homemade parabola will do better than what you can buy in the store.

If you ever find yourself in a hotel room with 2 laptops and 1 Ethernet port, you needn’t worry.

You can actually plug one into the Ethernet port ad have the wired laptop broadcast the wireless signal to the unconnected laptop, converting your wired laptop into an ad hoc access point.

For safety’s sake be sure to disable “Internet Connection sharing after every session, as it would enable people you may not want to connect to your laptop if you were in a malicious environment.

The fantastic no cost wifi detector NetStumbler program for Windows will discover all the wireless access points around your location, even if the SSID is NOT broadcasted, even if they have passwords or a weak signal. This is perfect for wardriving or even searching for internet cafes.

If you are a Mac user, google for MacStumbler.

You should stop broadcasting your network’s name. If they don’t know the name they would be hard pressed to attempt to connect. Go into the admin menu and turn off the SSID broadcast. Now your access point wont show up in the list of available networks.

This is not a failsafe method of protecting your network it is simply an additional layer of protection. People with advanced skills and tools will still be able to access it given enough time. This will only keep it off of the average persons listing. Of course 90% of users are “average”.

A lot like WPA, you can dictate who and what can connect to your access point. You must create a list of devices, along with their net cards MAC addresses that you want to allow. Then by default all other devices will be refused. This control will likely be found at 192.168.1.1 as well, in the administration section of the configuration.

Wi-Fi security isn’t really  all that safe, but if your router is more secure than others, the evil hackers will just likely to move along. Wireless access points don’t have too much in the way of security, and most are set to use WEP encryption to put a password their connections, but WPA which is becoming the de facto standard for wireless a bit harder to break than WEP. To convert to WPA, on your wireless devices admin page,(probably located at 192.168.1.1) change the level of security and make your WPA password to something hard to guess.

You can use a packet sniffer on the network, one like ethereal or wiresquid (shown below). This will shown you packet content(ethereal) and volume (wiresquid) as it flies past and around you through the air. Ethereal is a fantastic tool for those interested in the technical aspects of the network. Wiresquid is just plain interesting!