I’ve been looking for a wardriving application for my N95 ever since I got it. I mean hey, it has WiFi and a built-in GPS, so isn’t it the perfect portable wardriving hardware? Luckily today I came across the application I’ve been looking for. It’s called Barbelo.
First things first, you can grab a copy of Barbelo from here. You also need GPSd which I can not find a working link for.
- Now that you have GPSd and Barbelo installed, you have to run GPSd first. Select Menu -> Applications -> GPSd.
- You will be prompted to allow GPSd to use Positioning Data. Select Yes.
- Next you are prompted to allow GPSd to use the network and send or receive data. Also select Yes.
- It may take awhile for GPSd to get a fix. Try going outside somewhere with a clear, unobstructed view of the sky. Once you have a GPS fix as indicated by numbers other than 0 showing up under Latitude and Longitude, press Hide to leave GPSd running in the background. This is important because if GPSd isn’t running, Barbelo won’t be able to log any location data.
- Now run Barbelo by selecting Menu -> Applications -> Barbelo.
- As you can see, Barbelo has already found a network. The row of X’s below the network name corresponds to the signal strength. That’s great but we want to make sure we log this information. By default Barbelo doesn’t log anything. You must specifically select Options -> Start Log.
- In the main Barbelo screen, you can use the Left and Right toggles to move between Scan, Map, and Debug screens.
- I’m hoping the Barbelo developer might be intending to include a way to upload maps of your area in a future release as a map with nothing but a white background isn’t much of a map. At least it does show you where networks are in relation to each other and your current position.
If you go back to the Scan screen, you can scroll through the detected networks and press the Center toggle to see more information about that particular network.
- Also of interest, if you leave Barbelo running in the background and switch back to GPSd, you can see that GPSd has now detected the fact that Barbelo is running, as indicated by the 1 under Clients.
- Next, I went for a short drive to gather some data. When you’re finished gathering data, stop Barbelo from logging by selecting Options -> Stop Log.
- You can now stop Barbelo by selecting Options -> Exit.
- Don’t forget to stop GPSd as well. Switch back to GPSd and close it using the Right Soft Key to exit.
- Ok, now that we’ve gathered some data, let’s do something interesting with it. Barbelo stores its logs in your phones mass memory at E:\barbelo\logs
- Transfer the logs to your computer via Bluetooth or USB data cable. Luckily Barbelo saves its logs in the same XML format as Kismet so we can, for example, convert this data into a format suitable for Google Earth.
I found a handy perl script called kisgearth that does the job for us.
If you don’t have access to a Linux box, don’t worry. perl is also available for Windows. Watch for my future tutorial about running perl on Windows.
Converting the Barbelo log was as easy as running:
./kisgearth.pl -oN Barbelo-Oct-20-2008-1.kml -n 1 — Barbelo-Oct-20-2008-1.xml
kisgearth has a large number of options and filters. For a list, simply run kisgearth.pl without any parameters.
- The output file from the above command is a Google Earth kml file. Open Google Earth and choose File -> Open, then browse to your recently converted kml file and open it. Here’s what it looked like for me:
- Once you have your wardriving data saved in a standard format, the possibilities of what you can do with it are virtually endless. I’ve included a copy of my Barbelo log if you would like something to play with. If you discover something interesting, please let us know in the comments below.
Hello, thanks for the wonderful tutorial, I only have one little problem that I hope you can help me out with. In the converted file, the protocol encryption information was lost, it only saved whether the encryption was true or false, but it didnt saved if it was wep or wpa, when the encryption was true. Is there any way to fix this problema?
Super cool application !!! I’ve installed it now and tomorrow I’m gonna take it out for a “drive of war” =) to be continued…
Its really quite surreal to search for something this specific and find -exactly- what you want on a page that was only put together one day ago. Lovely guide man.
I’ve been using extgps with an external bluetooth stick and walking around my neighborhood with my laptop (with netstumbler) under my arm, which with all the elderly people living in this quiet suburb has earned me the kind of evil stares one might merit, were they wearing swastikas when they started going out of fashion.