Airfart

What is it?

AirFart is a wireless tool created to detect wireless devices, calculate their signal strengths, and present them to the user in an easy-to-understand fashion. It is written in C/C++ with a GTK front end. Airfart supports all wireless network cards supported by the linux-wlan-ng Prism2 driver that provide hardware signal strength information in the "raw signal" format (ssi_type 3). Airfart implements a modular n-tier architecture with the data collection at the bottom tier and a graphical user interface at the top.

Why is it called AirFart?

Following suit with the major players in the wireless arena, we decided the 'air' prefix best categorizes airfart. Further, re-arrange the letters in 'traf' and you can get 'fart.' So, our mission is to sniff out wireless devices who broadcast a 'scent'.

We hope our name isn't offensive. 99% of the people we have come in contact with have thought the name is clever and funny. Remember, no one is forcing you to use it... :-)

So what does it look like?

Authors:

AirFart was started as a project for a CS networking class. The original authors are Dave Smith, Evan McNabb, and Kendee Jones. Since then Michael Golden has done a lot of work on the GTK GUI. It has been released under the GPL and is actively being developed.

Where can I get it?

• Version 0.2.1 (March 10, 2003)
• Version 0.2 (March 7, 2003)
• Version 0.1a (December 14, 2002) - Initial Public Release

There is also anonymous CVS access. Go to http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=68565 for more info.

Debian packages available thanks to Ghe Rivero (ghe_rivero AT ranty DOT ddts DOT net). There are two kinds of packages:

airfart: the "stable" release

airfart-snapshot: frequently update packages with the latest cvs changes (almost created daily)

Add this to your sources.list file: deb http://ranty.ddts.net/~ghe_rivero/debian/airfart ./

In the near future we will have RedHat RPMS and Gentoo ebuilds available (we have people who have commited to creating and maintaining them). If you are interested in packaging AirFart in another format please contact us.

How do I contact the developers?

The airfart developers mailing list is located at airfart-devel@nabbernet.net

Please let us know of any problems or bugs. Patches are welcomed.