USERS MANUAL
802.11 Tester and Profile Builder for NetSwitcher
This manual, the software, and all images are Copyright © 2005 J. W. Hance.
Last Updated: 02/03/2005 02:36:55 PM -0500
NOTE: This is PRELIMINARY information and is subject to change without notice.
Table of Contents
The first step in getting started is to run the installer that you downloaded from the NetSwitcher web site. If you did not receive the installer from the NetSwitcher web site you should not install it and we can take no responsibility for the integrity of the installer when you have received it from a third party source. Unless you know what you are doing please accept all the defaults during the installation process. Once you have completed the installation you should have the program's icon on your desktop:
Start the application by double-clicking on this icon and the main window should open and look similar to this:
Before going any further, check the state of the two services in the upper-left corner of the window. The first time you run this tool you will likely see:
This indicates that the WZC (Windows Zero Configuration) service and the NDISUIO service are both running. In order to use the features of the 802_11 Tester you must stop the WZC service. Do this by clicking on the "Stop WZC Service" button. In a few seconds it should change to:
Indicating that the service has stopped. If the service does not stop you most likely are lacking local administrator group privileges on the workstation and cannot proceed any further without getting these privileges. Note that the WZC service will remain in the stopped state until you tell this tool to start it again. Windows will not automatically connect to any wireless networks when the WZC service is stopped. Once you have finished using the 802_11 Tester application you should either use NetSwitcher to configure a wireless profile or turn WZC back on to let Windows manage your wireless settings. Note that if you STOP the NDISUIO service (and you should have no reason to do so) you will not be able to re-START the WZC service until you start the NDISUIO service again. This is because WZC is dependent on NDISUIO and so it can't start until its dependencies are started.
The last step before we go into operational details is to select the network adapter you wish to operate on from the list of adapters in the drop-down list at the top. When you select the list only 802.11 wireless adapters should be displayed but some non-802.11 wireless adapters will sometimes appear as well. If you choose a non-802.11 adapter a warning will be displayed and you will not be able to do anything to the wireless settings until you choose an 802.11 adapter:
After selecting a real 802.11 adapter you should see:
Note that once you've selected an 802.11 wireless adapter the various controls at the left side of the window will become enabled and can accept user input.
Query/Informational Operations
The 802_11 Tester provides several features to query both the state of the network adapter and the site. First note that when you selected the adapter from the drop-down box some or all of the controls at the left were enabled and filled in with data:
In this example the card was already associated (i.e. connected to) a network called "WIRELESS" through an Access Point or AP. If you had been running WZC and are at a site where this network exists, you should see something similar.
In almost all situations you will need to change only 4 of these controls:
a) SSID - The SSID is the identifier that is used to name an access point (AP). In most cases an AP has a descriptive name assigned by the administrator. In most cases you connect to an AP by specifying its name here and clicking the "Set SSID" button. If you leave the SSID field blank, you tell the wireless card to connect to any available AP.
b) BSSID - The BSSID is a MAC address or a unique identifier. All APs have their own BSSID even if they share the same SSID. It would be quite common for a company that has multiple APs in their facility to have them all use the same SSID. By specifying the BSSID you can force the network card to associate with a specific AP even if the card thinks it might want to associate with a different one. In theory cards are supposed to make an intelligent choice based on speed and signal strength but out experience is that they usually choose poorly. If there is only one AP with the SSID you want to connect to, you can (and probably should) leave the BSSID field blank or avoid clicking the "Set BSSID" button.
c) Infrastructure - In almost all cases you will be connecting to an AP. This is "infrastructure" mode. The other possibility is "Ad-Hoc" where you operate with one or more network cards talking together without an AP. Start an Ad-Hoc network by choosing the Ndis802_11IBSS (i.e. Ad-Hoc) mode, clicking the "Set Infrastructure" button and choosing an SSID for your network, entering it into the SSID box, and clicking "Set SSID". Other users can join the network by using the same process or by using the WZC "View Available Wireless Networks" function.
d) WEP - This is encryption and if the AP you want to connect to uses WEP you MUST enable WEP, choose the correct key length, format, and index, and set the proper WEP key. If you don't know these things, you will not be able to connect to that network. Note above that the current status of WEP is that the AP requires WEP but no key has been set. The result of this is that a signal is being received from the AP but no connect is able to be made. Note that it is not possible to retrieve the WEP key which has been set into the wireless adapter. The box at the bottom of the WEP section is to enter the WEP key or to see the WEP key that has been retrieved from a stored 802.11 wireless profile (more on that later). But you will never see a WEP key displayed at this point.
Another interesting thing to do at this point is to click the "Get Information...." button:
This gives you some additional information similar to:
Some items of interest here:
Radio Freq is the frequency and channel that this card is currently operating on. In this case it's an 802.11b radio on channel 6 or 2,437.000 MHz (2.437 GHz). Your radio may vary depending on what bands it supports (i.e. the 2.4 GHz or the 5 GHz used by 802.11a cards) and what channel the AP is using.
The Site Survey section shows that there are two APs operating at my location. The one I'm using (WIRELESS) and another one called "TEST". Note that the signal strength (RSS) for "TEST" is -59 dBm. This is pretty weak but can probably be connected to reliably. The reliability of the connection seems to depend a lot on the quality of the radio in the network card. In this example the D-Link DWL-122 has proven to be a poor performer for RSS values less than -45 dBm. Note also that the "TEST" network does not use WEP and so I can connect to it without setting a WEP key. Often the RSS can be improved by re-orienting the laptop or network card or moving to a different location where a better signal can be heard.
Another useful feature here is the SiteMonitor™ scanning display. By clicking on the start button:
The window gives you a real-time graph of the signal strength of all detected APs:
In this case the display shows the two APs we saw earlier, "WIRELESS" and "TEST". Note how the display changes as I attempted to get a better signal strength for the TEST network. I was not successful in that and there are several areas (where the grey bar shows in the graph) where the AP was not heard at all. The SiteMonitor display updates approximately once ever second. If a new AP is found during a scan a new graph will appear for it:
In this example a new AP (called WAP11 - a LinkSys WAP-11) was powered up after about 10 seconds of SiteMonitor operation.
After 30 seconds of no signal, an AP will be dropped from the SiteMonitor window. Note that it is possible to join a wireless network by DOUBLE-CLICKING the mouse on the graph of the network you want to join. Open networks are joined with no additional information. WEP protected networks need and use the WEP information in the WEP controls at the left of the SiteMonitor window.
Common Configuration Operations
1) Getting Connected to an AP Network - This is the most common thing you will want to do. Whether you're at home, the office, the airport, or Starbucks Coffee you'll likely be connecting to an AP. Most "public" APs are open systems (i.e. they don't use WEP) but this example uses the slightly more complicated situation where WEP is required. Let's assume that we want to connect to the network called "WIRELESS". We know that it uses a 128-bit HEX key and that the key index is 1. The value of the WEP key is "10011111000011110000111101". (I know, not a very good key but it's just for example purposes.)
a) First DISASSOCIATE from any
existing network by clicking the "Disassociate..." button.
b) Enter the information we know about WIRELESS into the
fields:
c) This should be all you need
to enter. At this point click the
button.
d) At this point there should be a connection to the network.
From a CMD window we can run IPCONFIG:
e) Note that this adapter received an IP address (192.168.0.103) from the AP via DHCP. Most APs use private network addresses (in this case the 192.168 range), use DHCP (i.e. assign IP address automatically), and perform a NAT (network address translation) function for all computers on the wireless side of the unit.
2) Saving a setup for later retrieval and/or use within NetSwitcher.
a) Once you have the 802.11
wireless settings in the right state you can save the setup into a library.
b) Click the
button
and enter a descriptive name into the name entry dialog.
c) The setup is saved.
3) Restoring a setup.
a) Click on the
button
and locate the desired setup from the list.
b) Double-click on the setup to select it and click OK.
c) Click on the
button to apply
these settings to the 802.11 adapter.
4) Creating an IBSS (Ad-Hoc) network.
a) Click the DISASSOCIATE
button.
b) Setup the information fields like this:
Note that here we have created our own name
for the Ad-Hoc network, we've selected the Ndis802_11IBSS
infrastructure mode, and in this case have selected channel 3 which an earlier
site-survey indicated was not being used by any other network. This is not
actually required but using an open channel helps prevent interference and give
your network better range and performance. Some network cards fail to
accept the channel specification or simply ignore it. This is contrary to
Microsoft's design guidelines for 802.11 adapters and Windows XP but what are
you going to do?
c) Click the
button and your
new Ad-Hoc network should be created.
d) You can click the
button and see the new mode and the new network that was created:
Note that this adapter's mode is indeed
Ndis802_11IBSS and we see an SSID "MYNET" operating on channel 3 (2.422 GHz).
At this point other computers should see this Ad-Hoc network and be able to
connect to it.
e) Remember that an Ad-Hoc network will not have a DHCP
server so you'll need to assign IP addresses yourself for each computer that
joins the network. As always, NetSwitcher is a good choice for doing this.
In most cases you'll want to use private IP address ranges. Unless you
have a reason not to, use an address in the range 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.200.
Be sure that each computer in the network has a different IP address. The
netmask should be set to 255.255.255.0 but since all the computers are "local"
the actual value of the netmask doesn't matter much.
f) Note that not all wireless cards support the setting of
the channel for AdHoc mode. (It really makes no sense to set the channel
for infrastructure mode since the channel is defined by the AP.) In this
case, the radio will use whatever channel it sees fit which (hopefully) is
determined by scanning to locate a free channel.