asterisk users - Sep 2009 - OT: Question about Wifi sniffing on network

Most of you have needed at one time or another to sniff network
traffic for trouble shooting purposes.

Today I noticed that one of my SIP phone's web interface worked much
faster with Opera, so I wanted to see what exactly was going on. I set
up Wireshark and toook a look, but I got distracted by the fact that I
saw a bunch of strange things coming from "FreeboxS_nn". I know my
neighbor uses Free and has this device and there are probably others
in the neighborhood as well. I'm seeing this on a wifi connection to a
Mac Mini. The SIP phone was a Gigaset S675IP. If you have any slowness
in the web gui, try Opera 10, it somehow talks very quickly to the
phone.

My question is this:

On a local network, there are devices like pronters that announce
themselves, files sharing, computers, servers, etc.

On a WiFi router, is it normal that it "reaches out" to try to talk to
devices? I'm seeing groups of packets a couple times a minute, it
seems like a lot. Is this normal or is it some kind of hack attempt or
honeypot within range of my computer?

Thanks for any relevant info.

/r

On Sat, 12 Sep 2009, randulo wrote:
> Most of you have needed at one time or another to sniff network
> traffic for trouble shooting purposes.
>
> Today I noticed that one of my SIP phone's web interface worked much
> faster with Opera, so I wanted to see what exactly was going on. I set
> up Wireshark and toook a look, but I got distracted by the fact that I
> saw a bunch of strange things coming from "FreeboxS_nn". I know
my
> neighbor uses Free and has this device and there are probably others
> in the neighborhood as well. I'm seeing this on a wifi connection to a
> Mac Mini. The SIP phone was a Gigaset S675IP. If you have any slowness
> in the web gui, try Opera 10, it somehow talks very quickly to the
> phone.
Or try Google Chrome under Linux. The Siemens phones have a stupidly slow 
interface which seems to use more javascript that it should be using.
> My question is this:
>
> On a local network, there are devices like pronters that announce
> themselves, files sharing, computers, servers, etc.
Yes. Especially if you have any Microsoft clients or servers - they spew 
"stuff" all the time.
> On a WiFi router, is it normal that it "reaches out" to try to
talk to
> devices? I'm seeing groups of packets a couple times a minute, it
> seems like a lot. Is this normal or is it some kind of hack attempt or
> honeypot within range of my computer?
It shouldn't "reach out", but it will pass on ARP and other
broadcasts
from Ethernet to Wi-Fi and back again.

I don't know what "Free" is - I'm guessing some sort of
community mesh
network? Snooping any public wi-fi is going to reveal lots and lots of 
stuff you really would rather not see - or that the users would rather you 
didn't see!!!

Gordon