The arping application is a simple command that will allow you to ping devices by hostname, IP address, or MAC address. The unfortunate part is that most device will not respond to the arp requests, which are directed broadcast ICMP echo requests, though there are some out there that do. I go into more detail below regarding pinging via MAC address by providing an example of the typical output, example output when a MAC address responds to the ICMP echo requests, and details about how to configure hosts to respond to these ICMP echo requests. I also show a couple of the switches available with arping and provide examples of using arping to ping devices by IP and host.

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If you use btscanner, which is a Bluetooth scanner found in Backtrack Linux, a lot like I do then you will notice that the Public OUI list included is pretty far out of date. The OUI or Organizationally Unique Identifier list is what matches MAC addresses to manufacturers or vendors. This is how you can determine who produced a specific product that is talking on a network for instance a Bluetooth device that is attempting to communicate with your phone or your computer.

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I have been playing around with some of the bluetooth tools within Backtrack recently and btscanner is one of the main tools I have bene using. The btscanner application in Backtrack Linux provides two bluetooth scanning functions it calls inquiry scanning and brute force scanning. Unfortunately the package installed with Backtrack 5 release 3 will crash when attempting to use it for brute force scanning however I was able to create a fix that isn’t too messy to accomplish. Below we describe the btscanner crash in more detail and provide a way to get btscanner bluetooth brute forcing operating properly.

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In the past we have written a couple articles on using tshark to strip WPA capture files down to a specific ESSID or SSID but in some cases it can be more useful to strip the capture down by BSSID or MAC address of the WAP. Isolating packets by BSSID or WAP MAC address is useful in a scenario where a wireless deployment has numerous WAP’s and you have captured a specific SSID’s traffic from more than one WAP. Below is information on how to strip down a capture file based on BSSID and information on capture size before stripping the file down.

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While working on a project this weekend I needed a quick way to see a specific Bluetooth devices MAC address in Windows 7 because it was not displaying properly under the Windows Bluetooth Devices section. The easiest way that I located to display Bluetooth device MAC addresses in Windows 7 was by using an application called BluetoothView. Below I describe how to download BluetoothView, run BluetoothView, and obtain the a Bluetooth devices MAC address in Windows 7.

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