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Corys · Aug 27, 2003, 10:34 PM

Hello,
I have a snow base station and am noticing quite a bit of traffic on it..

if I shut down all the computers in the house, there still seems to be quite a bit of activity going through the airport and my cable modem..

I thought that someone could be tapping into my network, so I changed all the passwords on the airport and checked that only the one wireless machine is able to access it.

Anyone know if there is a tool that will allow me to see what's going on with the airport? what type of traffic? IP addy's?

anything else I can try to find out what the activity is?

ghporter · Aug 28, 2003, 10:25 AM

It's not uncommon for a wireless access point, or a wireless router (which the AirPort Base Station is) to do a lot of talking to the broadband modem it's connected to. My access point always shows wireless activity, even when there are no clients connected (and when it has its SSID broadcast turned off). On the other hand, I wouldn't trust to luck with that particular bit of experience.

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for your question about watching activity on your AirPort base. You've done everything you can at the wireless end, though, so you can feel a little better about it. The next question is whether somebody has gotten into your cable modem from the outside, and that is what monitoring your base station will tell you.

kampl · Aug 29, 2003, 07:52 PM

sudo tcpdump -i en1 not host your.ip.addr.here will show you all traffic on the wireless LAN you're connected to excluding traffic destined to or from your IP address. Basically it shows you what everyone else is doing. If you want to see packet contents in ASCII aswell, use sudo tcpdump -X -i en1 not host your.ip.addr.here . Hope that helps.

Corys · Sep 2, 2003, 12:39 PM

thanks for the info, I will check that when I get back home!

kampl · Sep 2, 2003, 07:26 PM

Originally posted by Corys:
thanks for the info, I will check that when I get back home!

Let me know if you find anything interesting. I like lookin at weird network traffic to figure out what it is. Pretty sick huh? There must be a twelve step program out there for me.

Corys · Sep 3, 2003, 12:31 AM

well..I tried it both ways, blocking my IP and not..

blocking my IP showed no other traffic
no blocking showed all the proper traffic from the 1 wireless machine, nothing unusual..

while doing the test there was still activity on the base station (the activity light is basically on 100% of the time)

it was good to know that there isn't anyone else on the network..

OpenStep · Sep 3, 2003, 04:10 PM

It's normal, ever since upgrading to Airport 3.0 the lights blink like crazy.. Guess it's the way it is.

kampl · Sep 3, 2003, 08:10 PM

Seriously? That's really weird. Are there separate activity lights for WAN, LAN and wireless? Are they all like that?

Corys · Sep 4, 2003, 11:29 AM

Originally posted by OpenStep:
It's normal, ever since upgrading to Airport 3.0 the lights blink like crazy.. Guess it's the way it is.

that could be it..I didn't notice it until recently (guessing when I did the update).

there is only one activity light, but when there is activity on the Airport, it corresponds with activity on the modem..so i'm guessing it's all WAN traffic..