README

HORST - Horsts OLSR Radio Scanning Tool (or)
HORST - Highly Optimized Radio Scanning Tool
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (C) 2005-2014 Bruno Randolf (br1@einfach.org)

Licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL) V2


= Overview =

“horst” is a small, lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer with a text 
interface. Its basic function is similar to tcpdump, Wireshark or Kismet, but 
it’s much smaller and shows different, aggregated information which is not 
easily available from other tools. It is mainly targeted at debugging wireless 
LANs with a focus on ad-hoc (IBSS) mode in larger mesh networks. It can be 
useful to get a quick overview of what’s going on on all wireless LAN channels 
and to identify problems.

See the man page for more detailed and up-to-date information:
	$ man -l horst.1
	(or)
	$ nroff -mandoc horst.1

Also see: http://br1.einfach.org/tech/horst/


= Building =

Official git repository:	git://br1.einfach.org/horst
GitHub clone:			https://github.com/br101/horst

"horst" is just a simple tool, and "libncurses" is the only requirement (be sure
to install it's header files too). Therefore building is as simple as typing:

	$ make

To see very detailled debugging output you can use

	$ make DEBUG=1

To experimentally build for Mac OSX or other Unix using libpcap use:

	$ make PCAP=1

Please note that PCAP and OSX support is not well tested and some features,
like getting or setting the channel are not implemented on OSX.


= Background =

"horst" was created to fill a need in the Wireless Mesh networking / Freifunk
community of Berlin but has since grown to be a useful tool for all kinds of 
Wireless networks.

With the usual wireless tools like iw, iwconfig and iwspy and even kismet or 
WireShark it is hard to measure the received signal strength (RSSI) of
all available access points, stations and ad-hoc networks in a given location. 
It's especially difficult to differentiate the different nodes which form an 
ad-hoc network. This information however is very important for setting up, 
debugging and optimizing wireless mesh networks and antenna positions.

"horst" aims to fill this gap and lists each single node of an ad-hoc network
separately, showing the signal strength (RSSI) of the last received packet. This
way you can see which nodes are part of a specific ad-hoc cell (BSSID), 
discover problems with ad-hoc cell merging ("cell splitting", a problem of 
many WLAN drivers) and get a general overview of what's going on in the "air".

To do this, "horst" uses the monitor mode including radiotap headers (or for 
older drivers prism2 headers) for the signal strength information of the wlan 
cards and listens to all packets which come in the wireless interface. The 
packets are summarized by the MAC address of the sending node, analyzed and
aggregated and displayed in a simple text (ncurses) interface.


= Contributors =

Thanks to the following persons for contributions:

Horst Krause
Sven-Ola Tuecke
Robert Schuster
Jonathan Guerin
David Rowe
Antoine Beaupré
Rami Refaeli
Joerg Albert
Tuomas Räsänen