PXI
Can I set a MAC Address on the PXIe-5673E?
Hi all,
I was wondering if you could help me. I am currently looking to generate a signal using the PXIe-5673E Signal Generator, using the WLAN toolkit to generate a signal in 802.11g. The receiver device is receiving frames from the device, but as with everywhere these days, it is picking up packets from interfering signals.
The receiver does allow for MAC Address filtering, so I wanted to know if there was some way to set a MAC Address to the PXIe-5673E so that the receiver could only accept packets from there? Has anyone had any success doing this?
Any advice is much appreciated.
Regs,
Rob
@Robert.L wrote:
Hi Rob
Unfortunately it appears that it is not possible to set the MAC address on the PXIe-5673E using the WLAN toolkit, however i have put it forward as a product suggestion.
A possible work around would be to use a wife sniffer and select a quiet channel in the area.
Robert
Old story but I'll re-tell it.
About 1986 or so I was working with Robert J. Schamalstieg at Digital Equipement Corporation and we were teaching ourselves to do machine level programming (VAX Macro). He choose a project that would help Bob in his day to day work supporting networks. At teh time LANanalyzers were rare and really wanted one of his own. While review the suorce code for VMS 4.X he ran across a property for teh network adapter called "permiscuous mode". It turns out this setting would force a bypass of the destination address on incoming network packets and would effectively let us "probe" the network. SO we designed the app as produced consumer and he did the producer and I did the consumer to write the raw data to disk (my area of expertise was disk drive and clusters (fore-runner of modern RAID adapters).
SO we integrated our code and was testing it out in the office by filtering on specific protocols (LAT-Local Area Transport, in this case) to watch the keys being pressed by one of our bosses as he was writting a e-mail. When we looked at what was happening either he or I said "we can get very nosey with this!" So at that point everything got renamed;
Sniffer - app described above
SNiCode - parsed and decoded packets
Olfactory.dat - Raw data files
Olfactory.txt formated data.
So I share this story because, I have been keen to hear about others inventing their own version of the Sniffer we wrote.
Ben
Thanks for the replies guys. I wanted it as a verification for an FER test that I'm doing. I want the UUT to receive packets from the Sig Gen and calculate the FER, but obviously with everything these days, the place is full of wireless routers and the like, so it does pick up packets from other sources. As these packets contain a MAC in the header, I thought it would be an idea to set the MAC in the header from the Sig Gen, and since the UUT has MAC filtering, it would only recognise packets from the Sig Gen for the FER calculation.
But it's not a big issue. Eventually, the UUT will be tested in a shielded enclosure, so the FER calculated should be accurate.
As for sniffing out a quiet channel, the customer has specified the channels to test on the particular band, so we've no flexibility there. (As it happens, I get 0% FER for channel 14, which seems to be the quietest around here!).
Thanks again,
Rob
