When using a WLC it is very easy to turn a access-point into a remote “sniffer” and let it send you captured data for a specify channel. A colleague of my asked if this was also possible for an autonomous access-point. I did not know a method to do this and also Google was not very helpful, so I decided to do some testing and did found a method to get the same results!

Autonomous access-points have a station-role called “scanner” which can be used in conjunction with the obsolete WLSE software. In this mode it sends raw captured data from the wireless spectrum to the WLSE for further analysis. Lucky for us Wireshark can also decode this packets. You have to configure your IPv4 address as destination and configure Wireshark to listen to this port and decode it as “CIWDS” (so not the PEEK type which has to be used with the WLC “sniffer” mode). From here one you can do whatever you want to do with the capture 😀

Int dot X
station-role scanner
monitor frames endpoint ip address 192.168.101.238 port 1337