constant wireless activity

E

Eva_Unit_0

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2005
Messages
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I've noticed some unusual activity on my thinkpad x24 when I'm in linux. Whenever my wireless connection (eth1) is up it constantly has network activity, no matter what. Even if no networking apps are open there is constantly ~10 KB/s of network activity (as measured by gkrellm) over my wireless connection constantly. The wireless card is an internal mini-pci prism2 card (woot for prism2 :cool: )

Running Gentoo Linux, 2.6.16 kernel. Any ideas why the wireless network is always doing something?
 
It takes work to maintain a wireless connection. There will always be some kind of traffic. Even if it's only listening out for broadcast SSIDs.

My understanding at least.
 
You could try playing with iftop to see where the traffic goes?
 
Don't forget a wirless connection is like your on a hub, all traffic is rebroadcasted and every one sees it, weather or not its destined for you. Also like mentioned, packets are periodicly sent out to tell the NIC that the AP is still alive and kicking.
 
^ yeah after some further investigation it seems that what Xipher said is what's going on. When I'm on my own personal router in my dorm room I get no excess activity, but when I'm on the RIT network in the academic buildings I get the constant activity. Must just be the ambient traffic...I guess I just never noticed it before.
 
can use something like "watch netstat -tn" so see what connections your making?
 
No, but they could use ethereal or ettercap (dropping their interface into promiscuous mode). It does depend on configuration though, some places have each client make a tunnel, to keep you from being able to sniff others traffic.
 
I've had the same activity on my IBM T40 and Emachines M5310. Doesn't seem to affect the performance at all. Doesn't matter where I am, always does it when using the wireless.
 
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