You might be a pen tester, network security admin or just a security hobbyiest which ever it is you might be interested in auditing your wireless LAN. I will describe the tools and hardware required to do so.

Hardware:
  1. Laptop [Suitable for mobility]
  2. Atheros Chipset PCMCIA Card Orinico
  3. A wireless 9db portable antenna
  4. Backtrack 2 live CD or Installed


Just insert the pcmcia card into your laptop, insert the cd and boot from it.

Once your logged into backtrack or any other linux distro with aircrack-ng suite your ready to go.

To check whether your wireless card is there simply open a shell and type ifconfig ath0. It should display details of your wireless.

To do anything with the wireless adaptor you have to put it into monitor mode. To do so type airmon-ng start wifi0. Now your ready to go.

To do a basic scan using aircrack-suite simply type airodump-ng ath1[the name of virtual interface created in the previous step]. Hopefully you should see a number of wireless access point.

Thats it for now hopefully next time i should post how to audit a wep encryped network, then a wpa, n lastly maybe a wpa2.

Recap:
ifconfig ath0 up [to start the interface if not done by the OS]
ifconfig ath0 [display interface details]
airmong-ng start wifi0 [put the card into monitor mode]
airodump-ng ath1 [scan for wireless networks]

Hope you enjoyed the mini tutorial

thanks