in reply to Designing a wireless application

Picking up a mac address is something that every packet sniffer can do.

What are you ultimately trying to do? Write a perl client that reads everything sent over the network, try to guess the parameters and then connect to such a network?

Or something completely different?

Describe what you want to do, and please be very verbose. Read your question again, and ask yourself if somebody could understand it without knowing your mind.

And if it's not a project for the sake of learning perl (or some coding techniques) inform yourself if there is an application that does your job.

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Re^2: Designing a wireless application
by perlsyntax (Pilgrim) on Mar 18, 2008 at 15:38 UTC
    Write a perl client that reads everything sent over the network, try to guess the parameters and then connect to such a network.It is a project i plan to work on so i can learn perl better.:)
      It seems that my guess work was much more solid than usual ;-)

      Since I know of no cross-platform API for wireless interfaces the first step is to define the operating system you want to use.

      The second step is to find out what kind of interfaces the wireless API offers, and decide to use one of them.

      Of course you need to know something about the protocols being used.

      The rest is mostly a matter of programming, and shouldn't be too hard. For specific questions you can always come back here ;-)

      Oh and there's a minor judicial point that you shouldn't forget: in most countries it's illegal to connect to some hotspots, especially if they are encrypted (for example in Germany it is forbidden if it's obvious that the owner doesn't want guests in his network, for example with MAC blacklists, WEP or WPA).

      This subject is discussed at some length here Perl Design Patterns War Driving and some of the techniques that can be used.

      As pointed out by moritz one needs to be aware of the legal issues that may be infringed in using them.