Hey, just spent a couple days developing this wireless network visualization tool - it sits in monitor mode and deduces information about nearby clients and what APs they're associated with, and displays them with pictures!

EDIT - Wiviz now has a homepage - http://wiviz.natetrue.com

--Older stuff--

You can grab it from the link below - just untar it into / (I haven't made it an ipkg yet).

The webpage should be served by the normal httpd, so go to http://(your WRT)/wiviz/wiviz.html to start visualizing.  IE support is a little shaky right now.

Screenshots also there:

http://students.washington.edu/natetrue/wiviz/

EDIT: Updated to not rely on wl for monitor mode

EDIT-again: Wiviz now detects and reports encrypted and ad-hoc networks.  Also improved the self-organizing code some, so as to make the resulting display cleaner.  Plus new screenshots!

EDIT: Wi-viz requires OpenWRT experimental.  It will not work on the stable version.

This looks really cool!  I installed it on my WRT54G, but I am only getting the basic webpage - there's no detail in it.

If I try running wiviz manually, I get:
@OpenWrt:/# /usr/sbin/wiviz
Wi-Viz infogathering daemon by Nathan True
AP mac: 00:0F:66:B9:EF:40
New host, 00:0F:66:B9:EF:40, type=AP
Failure to open pcap!
Err=ioctl: No such device

I have libpcap installed, as well. 

Any help is appreciated.  Thanks!

What I'm guessing is your wireless interface isn't in monitor mode.  The wiviz-get.cgi script calls the wl command to put the card into monitor mode (in the next version this will be done automatically without wl) - so if you don't have wl installed, my tar won't work.

EDIT: You don't need wl anymore.  Just download the tar.gz attached above and extract it as before.  Wi-viz will automatically turn the card on monitor mode while you're watching the display and turn it off 30 seconds after you stop viewing.

Also, mousing over hosts on the display will give you some more info on that host.

The "package" is something broken:

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           14 Jan  1 00:02 wiviz.css -> /nfs/wiviz.css
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           15 Jan  1 00:02 wiviz.html -> /nfs/wiviz.html
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           13 Jan  1 00:02 wiviz.js -> /nfs/wiviz.js

So, nothing is displayed...

Terribly sorry, fixed.

what about current wifi connections from clients when switching to monitor mode. will they be dropped when starting Wi-viz?

getting constant JS errors with IE, works fine in Firefox.

the JS errors are usually in the line "new Array()" (when you add a new empty array at the end of the top.hosts_list array)

but i also get errors when some hiascii-char-ssid's are seen around. you might want to urlencode them.

and sometimes the AP's disappear very fast. maybe increase the timeout before deleting the AP.

The monitor mode in the WRT's is a little interesting.  Instead of turning off all MAC layer stuff, it continues to operate as normal, except when the MAC layer would reject a packet (for example when it's to another AP), the monitor mode interface (prism0) will receive it.

So Wiviz won't affect the router's ability to perform as an access point.  However, excessive wireless traffic may slow down your router as Wi-viz needs to examine each packet.

I'm still seeing the problem WildBill reported, "Failure to open pcap!"

I redownloaded the file from the link in the initial post; is this the correct file?

Oh, looks like I forgot to mention: Works with OpenWRT Experimental only.

Oh yeah, that might be important

Can you fix a 'stable' version?

I have just installed 'experimental' and i must
say, i really liked this proggy. thanx!

There's really no good reason for me to backport to stable - for one, I don't have a router running stable right now.  Also, stable is quite deprecated and experimental is very stable now.

So it is, i'm running it on all my wrt's.
Thanx anyway.

/S.D

Hi

It's a really great app.

There is just a strange thing with particular ap, their name are not well displayed (like there : http://students.washington.edu/natetrue … viz-3.gif)

And another thing : is it possible to see the sources of this app, while i was trying it, i thought that i would like to read them to see what is happening with these ap names.

Will you do an ipkg ?

The Wi-viz program reports the SSID exactly as it's received - in this case, the AP's SSID was a series of seven null characters.

Also, Wi-viz now has a homepage - http://wiviz.natetrue.com - source is posted, GPL.

you can use this to fix it.
/www/wiviz/wiviz.js, genHTML() function.

replace

    nh += "' onmouseover='mousenter(event)' onmouseout='mouseout(event)'"
        + "><br><span class='hostdesc'>" + hs.mac + "<br><i>'" + hs.name;

with

    var tmpname=hs.name.replace(/x00/g, "xB7");

    nh += "' onmouseover='mousenter(event)' onmouseout='mouseout(event)'"
        + "><br><span class='hostdesc'>" + hs.mac + "<br><i>'" + tmpname;

at least it prevents the JS errors that occur when you mouseOver() a null-ssid node.

fwiw, wiviz appears to run ok on the "old stable" openwrt.  compiled 20050407.

it seems to cause problems if i run it on an AP thats using WDS.  otherwise at first glance it appears to work.

very neat tool.  good approach doing it all in js.

WhiteRussian RC3, Wiviz 1.0 from nico's repository ( http://openwrt.org/downloads/people/nic … mipsel.ipk ). Not visualizing anything on Safari 2.0.1 (OSX's browser) while working properly on Firefox.

Regards

Wallace

I'm using the version taken from the author's site (not from the backports).
Works fine for some months now.

The only glitch with this version is: my AP is in WPA2, the utility reports "Encryption unknown"...

Is the backported version any better in this aspect?

This may be caused by a limitation of the wlcompat kernel module, see ticket #849 for a fix.

I also get the error mention above:

It was installed through ipkg on White Russian RC5. Should I be using a different package? And if so, which one? Multiple sources are mentioned here...