This post was inspired by an email from David W (who I can’t reply to for some reason – the email is not getting through). I wanted to have a quick look around the place to see what software is available for stumbling/wardriving/network scanning etc. Here’s what I came up with;

Net Stumbler

The pre-eminent stumbling program for Windows machines, Net(work) Stumbler appears to support a wide variety of wifi cards, presents useful information (including a graph of signal strength over time) and supports GPS input to pinpoint the location of the WAPs you are detecting. I use Net Stumbler with my Netgear WG511 card, on a Sony VAIO laptop, running Windows 2000 and it works excellently (including GPS data now!)

Kismet

As far as I know, Kismet is the favourite *NIX stumbling/scanning tool, and “supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic”

MacStumbler

“MacStumbler is a utility to display information about nearby 802.11b and 802.11g wireless access points”. Apparently works with Apple Airport Card and MacOS 10.1 or greater.

There are heaps more than those ones, but they are the big-boys as far as I can tell. As I mentioned, I use Net Stumbler, because I have a Win2k laptop, and it works with my card. So far, so good! I’d like to hear what other people use and any problems they’ve run into with certain packages?