Aruba's RFprotect Mobile offers a broad assurance suite

Formerly part of the Network Chemistry product line acquired by Aruba, RFprotect Mobile is an omnibus WLAN assurance suite with a wide variety of functions. With respect to packet capture and analysis, however, the suite serves primarily as a source from which to get the custom drivers required to turn a set of otherwise ordinary Wi-Fi cards into sensors and (for our purposes here) packet capture vehicles.

The Aruba suite then fires up Paglo's Packetyzer 5.0.0 analysis tool, which, when enabled by said customized Aruba drivers, does a serviceable job of capturing and analyzing 802.11 frames. Packetyzer was originally developed by Network Chemistry and the current release dates to 2006. Not otherwise capable of 802.11 capture and analysis, Packetyzer depends upon RFprotect Mobile only as a source of drivers - sounds like it might be a good tool on its own if Aruba should decide to make the drivers available separately from RFprotect Mobile. Packetyzer is free, based on Ethereal, and it's also open source.

Packetyzer's age shows a bit; it's not very visually appealing, and the help file is incomplete. But there's a lot of functionality here if one is willing to explore, including statistical analysis of captured data and very robust filtering capabilities. We wouldn't mind using this tool regularly if the drivers were available separately from RFprotect Mobile. RFprotect Mobile is regardless a very useful assurance tool, so users of this application have access to a decent packet capture and analysis tool, albeit with less convenience and ease of use than AirMagnet or OmniPeek.

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