Well, my excuse is that I was on the road last week at Network World's IT Roadmap event in San Francisco, and thus I completely forgot to mention that the third entry in my six-article series reporting on the detailed testing of WLAN management products that I've been waist-deep in for months now was published last Monday. This one covers discovery tools and connection managers, and has a few surprising results.
I suppose one is that third-party tools are in fact quite useful in enterprise environments, Sure, many of these can trace their roots back to the hacker tools of the let's-break-WEP era, and, to be fair, many such applications are still in circulation, although not really current anymore. A few folks e-mailed to ask why I didn't review NetStumbler. Well, it hasn't been updated in years and doesn't work with many contemporary Wi-Fi adapters. Ands most enterprise IT managers are looking for tools that control and report, not hack.
And I found a couple of good ones in the batch I tested, along with a few others of at least passing interest. I've added PassMark's WirelessMon to my personal toolkit; this is a very robust product that gathers a lot of useful statistics. You might also check out the runner-up, Sandy Road's WiFi Hopper. But I listed a bunch of others that, while containing less functionality, are still a whole lot more useful (with the exception of a couple on the Mac) than the default, Microsoft's Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC), which of course has zero configuration because its functionality is close to that number. And all of these are free, and some open-source.
Another surprise was how good Intel's PROSet/Wireless console is. This, of course, works only with Intel chipsets, but is very rich in functionality and, BTW, also free. I expect that chipset vendors will be relying more on software to differentiate their offerings in the future, great for us users who are both lazy and poor.
And the future of this space is very bright. The recently-ratified 802.11k and still-in-progress 802.11v standards should help, minimizing if not eliminating driver dependencies in discovery and connection tools. I also expect that centralized client management, along the lines of that in the Trellia product I recently discussed, will also become much more common; Intel's PROSet/Wireless already has some of this. And, given the recently-discovered vulnerabilities in WPA, we may even see the hacker community renew innovation here in their own unique if twisted way. But some good just might come of this as well, just as the vulnerabilities in WEP spurred the development of a broad range of tools that are actually useful to those of us just trying to get our (legitimate) jobs done.
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Mathias is a principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless advisory firm in Ashland, Mass.
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You neglected to report on
You neglected to report on the Broadcom WLAN client utility (also known as the Dell WLAN client utility), which I have found to be the best of all client software. It certainly is better than the Intel ProSet utility and the Windows WZC utility.
The Broadcom client is only available with adapters that have Broadcom chipsets, but that is equivalent to the restrictions on the Intel utility.
There are a lot of these...
I know, I've heard from a number of people about their personal favorite not getting tested. One of the problems with doing articles like these is the potentially large number of candidate products and limited column inches (and, I might add, time; this is a lot of work). Thanks regardless for mentioning this - I do not use Broadcom-based adapters regularly, but I have heard (adding your note here) good things about their tools.
Thank you for the note.
Craig.
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