As seen elsewhere :-)

First, the software is pretty awesome. It's tiny and packed with features - wow! The amount of information it picks up on even weak or momentary contacts is pretty impressive, you've done a great job with this puppy. I'll be using it to audit a large facility that's not SUPPOSED to have wireless but may indeed turn out to have some rogue WAPs. If this goes through I will try to get my company to send you some cash, it's the least they could do...

Having said that, some requests:

Some form of autosave. I've lost quite a bit of data driving around due to laptop problems and some way to save either after each new contact or on a periodic basis would be awesome. Both would be better if we could toggle between them.

Some way to see total number of contacts. Either at the bottom or in a column, bottom would be best to save real estate.

I see that you post last time seen but it's not clear if the date is also put in the log. If not could we have that? Maybe not even visible but when I sort on the time column I'd like to be sure I'm really seeing "new sightings" and not some from the day before mixed in. This may already be done but not clear to me. I've not looked in the log for the raw time data to double check so this may be a stupid request. *Hrm it does seem to see the date and sort on it. Cool!

Some sites throw me an IP as soon as I hit them - could you flag those sites? Some sites never get strong enough to make a full connection but show up in the log, anyway to highlight the full connections with or without an IP? Just knowing who's thrown an IP would be a giant step forward.

We've got fonts, any way to change background colors? I might have missed this in there somewhere so excuse me if this is a request made in ignorance.

Netstumbler appears to announce itself to each network. I'm not sure if this was some sort of CYA feature or needed in order to pull the data you do - I've seen it in packet captures. Generally I'd say no one notices but it would be nice if we could turn this off. I fully understand if this is a no-go. Alternately for those of us with WAPs it would be nice to have an application that would sense these "anouncements" for us.

*New additional request - Occasionally my serial port locks up and the GPS coordinates freeze. This puts crap data into the log. A means of deleting networks from the would be nice to have. I can export and edit the data of course but I can't exactly import it back in either. I just don't want to add bad data to the database is all.

Some help in triangulating sources. IMO this is a big job and something I know you'd mentioned being interested in already but I thought I'd throw it out. It sounds like lot's of people are working on post process software so I'm not sure this is something to ask you for and I'm not sure this is a big deal feature-wise. It would just be really neat to see this work is all :-) Hrm, maybe two cards and antenna to do a DF in a single driveby? Sort of like the way LoJak works. Not something I'd imagine many would use though..

Hrm, those are all the features I can think of. You seem to have covered most everything already I think. Some of what's above ought to be easy to incorporate, some of it will probably be a giant PITA.

Additional cards would be nice of course, I bought a Sony VAIO card after being told it was a Lucent clone. Yeah, same casing but no go :-( I might be willing to lend it for testing though if needed, contact me offline. I've got a DLink as well but I believe you know about those already - no external antenna connection that I can see either. The Lucent rox!

Lastly, an ignorant question, is there a mailing list out there for folks interested in this kind of thing? I may have missed it. Guess I'll be frequenting the forums a good bit otherwise. :-)

Here are some thoughts that I had for the program--

Actually useful ideas:

1) "Audit mode" wich would allow for continuous logging/association of GPS coordinates and AP signal strength. I can see this as being a very legit tool for doing wireless auditing for companies - how far is their signal leaking out of the building? Does it leak into the street just a few feet, or does it leak all the way out to the Starbucks on the opposite corner? That way, you can just walk around the perimiter of a building to get the data (instead of sort of manually doing it now). Maybe even a continuious beeper in "audit mode" (like the beeping on a DSS dish tuning screen) so that you can hear the signal getting weaker or stronger as you walk around.

For-fun ideas:

1) Text-to-speech output of new APs found. Could be fun to drive along and hear the laptop say "New Lucent AP found, transmitting on channel 6 with no encryption"

That's about it for the moment. I'm sure I'll think of more later.

-Toomer

gear: Sony VAIO picturebook C1-VN, with Lucent Gold+external antenna, and Rand McNally GPS.

what about adding this feature to net stumbler...
make it log locations then find it for you on terraserver lol
as well as on a map...lol

Netstmbler DOES log the signal as it's looking for WAPs. Go to the particular SSID, expand it, and click on the MAC you're interested in. Tada, a history of that station's signal strength! It's not obvious but the file appears to store the GPS coords of each part of the signal. Export it to text, run some backend processing, and you can even direction find the WAPs!

The speech stuff might be interesting down the road but right now I guess I'm looking to suggest functionality kinds of things rather than bells and whistles. I'm also trying to be sensitive to the fact that this project is a spare time only sort of thing for the programmer. This software is pretty cool and if Compaq releases their version "for pay" for the IPAQ I think that'll really stink. This product could probably be sold as-is for those that do wireless infrastructure for a living, thankfully the programmer has chosen not to go that route right now. If\when he gets tired of it perhaps he'll release source and the community can go nuts - then we'll see talking features and who knows what else (lol). Of course if this is just a fun thing to learn with maybe he'll do the speach stuff sooner rather than later. I just try to bear in mind that he's got a family to be with and try to ask for incremental improvements if possible. (shrug)

BLKMGK-

Thanks for the info about the data file. I never bothered to open the file up and look at what's in there, but I'll give it a gander.

On useful ideas, I think a great idea would be an option to launch an external command whenever a new AP is found - with an option to pass out whatever sort of variables you want. That would give us the option to launch our own code with each new AP - whether it's a batch job, VBScript, whatever. That way, those of use who are programatically inclined can do our own sort of expansion to the program.

-Toomer

If you expand the SSID and click on the MAC you'll see a nice graph of the data too. This isn't a case of having to go into the data file - the data actually gets used :-)

Launching an external file is a neat idea. IPCONFIG /renew anyone?