Droid Hacks » wifi

Monitoring Network Traffic Using OS X

Lead Hacker — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:19:31 +0000

Here’s a tip for monitoring network traffic from your Android phone using OS X. The same thing works for iPhone (or any other mobile device you can configure to use a wifi connection). I frequently use it to see how some bit of client/server interaction is done.

Install Wireshark
Follow the instructions in the readme to also install the ChmodBPF script
Under Sharing area of the OS X settings app configure your system to use an ethernet connection and share it out to wifi clients
Now configure your device to connect to the wifi network provided by your system, test to make sure it works
Startup Wireshark and set it to capture traffic (wifi is en1 on MacBook Pro systems, what I normally use)

And that’s it, you should now get quite readable dumps of what applications are doing to communicate. Lots of interesting things you can learn digging into how folks structure their client/server interaction.

Toggle Settings

Lead Hacker — Tue, 26 May 2009 07:05:18 +0000

Normally I have a few quick toggle applications sitting on my home screen to quickly switch on and off Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, etc. It really saves a ton of battery life switching off hardware when it’s not in use. I just ran across the free Toggle Settings app from cooolmagic. It has all the hardware switches, some cool status info (like what wifi network you’re connected to), and new toggles for stuff like auto-sync. Very useful, and it looks pretty slick. Just search for “Toggle Settings” in the market and you should find both the 1.1 and 1.5 versions of the app. Here’s a quick rundown of the controls:

Turn on and off airline mode
Turn on and off autosync
Turn on and off bluetooth
Turn on and off GPS
Turn on and off Wifi, and show what network you’re connected to if you are connected
Control the brightness level and screen timeout, or disable screen timeout completely
Turn on and off silent mode
Control the volume