How to check who is on my WLAN Network

[Cherokee]

I have some of my clients who are using WLAN in their business premises. Some are small but some has large area where more than 100 users use the internet. Some of them have created hotspots. Now one thing which I am trying to know that how can I figure out the number of users on my wifi network. What can I do is create a specific network only for free users and other for secured. But that can eat up my resources plus I have to give a specific time to manage the same. I need some easy solution for monitoring the lan network. I also what to check what people are right now online. Is there a specific tool for that. If yes then how to use the same and what does it offers. I need some good suggestions on securing the wifi network. Wifi network are much easily prone to penetration. I tried several techniques, what I am trying to get is a common option for all of them. Thanks.

[Snake08]

There are already several options you can try to monitor your network. But that needs a admin level access. You can install server monitoring applications on your main server and that will generate a log file of all the activities. It will also provide you current ip addresses of the users. It is almost recommended to use a secured wifi network. In my views the WPA is better. But for that you have to check that your hardware must support the same. It is easy to use and mostly eliminates the process of unwanted access by provided a complex key. This keys are not typically found in a dictionary. I will recommend you that you must not hesitate to use a heavy authentication with a certificate. This is much more secure than the other options.

[Zachary]

There are some lan analyzer tool, but continuous monitoring generates big log files which is not easy to trace the users. There is one thing you can check is, the amount of time a users surfs on internet. But that too you have to create from your server. Anonymous users are not easy to find. The one important thing you can try out is that you can configure your network to static IP and not DHCP, do not allow any other IP that does not correspond to a machine on your network. This is one other the most secure way to deal with unwanted access. There are some companies which provide professional solution for Wifi Analyzing. This services offers you third party support for analyzing your wifi connection. One of the software is called as WiFi Analyzer PRO. Try this out hope that then can give you some better support.

[Big Fish]

Using a Windows Server is also not a bad choice. But the only issue is that it is not for all users. In a hotspot you does not provide any user profile and users can just connect to your internet via turning their wifi on. But in this you can create domain and provide different user account with limited rights. This is best suited for office purpose. Other than this you can try MAC address filtering. While this protection is completely bogus as it is easy to fake a mac address, but this will still be some virtue to stop playing God. However to make this more efficient you can fix macs hard by prohibiting arp redirection. It's not very complicated and easy to do.

[Shen]

Have you heard about sniffers. They are tools which sniff your internet connection and provide information on what is going on. That means the current activity. There are various sniffers that you can download and use. But I think this sniffers does not work if you have security application on your system. It is being blocked. So for that you will need disable the same. There are various practices you can carry out to make your wifi more secure. There are other more tools, but they are not suitable for wide area wifi access. There is also a similar tool called network analyzer. It is a device that listen to the traffic in a network, that is to say to capture the information that circulating. So that you can keep on the activities of the network.

[Steve123]

It is true that on wifi network, data is sent to all machines on the network. However, in standard use machines ignore packets. Thus, using the network interface in a definite mode you can listen to all traffic through a network adapter. There are ready to use tools which are called as sniffers. A sniffer is a powerful tool to study the network traffic. It is commonly used for administrators to analyze problems on their network and to know the traffic flowing through it. Thus, the intrusion detection (IDS for intrusion detection system) are based on a sniffer to capture frames, and use a database of rules (rules) to detect suspicious frames. But also ensure that does not put extra load on the server.

[Sabastiaan]

Like all management tools, the sniffer can also be used as an attacker with physical access to the network to gather information. This risk is even more important on networks without son because it is difficult to confine the airwaves in a demarcated area, so that malicious people can listen to the traffic just by being in the neighborhood. The vast majority of Internet protocols do pass information in clear, that is to say, but not encrypted. Use encrypted protocols for all communications whose content has a high level of confidentiality. Use a detector to sniff. It is a tool to probe the network looking for machines using promiscuous mode. Security is an most important task that you must consider on the network.