Diary of Thursday, 17th February 2005

Prepared by: S.Anandan Shanmugam

9.00 am The day started with a lecture on Network Security by Rob Flickenger till 10.30 am. Lots of new stuff and new tools were introduced to monitor and sniff networks. Rob also explained how vunerable wireless networks can be and how best can we solve some of those problems.

10.30 am We had coffee break and some of us continued with informal discussion on network security.

11.00 am We went to the lab and had our client PCs hooked up to the Access Point, codenamed SuperSecret AP and each group was assigned to download and install a program called Kismet on our Linux machines.
After that, we had a demo on how Kismet works and on several other tools related to network monitoring such as Driftnet and EtherPEG.

12.30—2.00 pm Lunch as usual. Nothing extreme except the usual jokes.

2.00 pm We continued with our lab on running Kismet and Driftnet.

2.45 pm We had a lecture by Prof Pietrosemoli on the topic of Geometry of Parabolic Reflectors. The importance of parameters such as focal length, disk diameter, elevation angle and antenna positions were presented.

3.45 pm Introduction to a software called NEC2 was presented. This software is used for designing and analysis of antennas. Prof Struzak showed some examples of different antenna geometrys and its simulated radiation pattern done using the above mentioned software. Marco pointed out some of the main features of the software.

After that, Carlo continued and demonstrated on how to make further measurements using a calibrated reference antenna on one side(transmitter) and various types of other antennas the class made on the other side (receiver) with the help of the spectrum analyser. Gain of the assembled antennas were calculated.

The day's session ended at about 6 pm.

S.Anandan Shanmugam
Department of Biomedical Engineering
University of Malaya, MALAYSIA