Advice?

Hi all;

I've been assigned to do an evaluation of 802.11 wireless technology for my company. We intend to use it in a slightly irregular fashion, and want ot make sure it will suit our needs in ad-hoc mode. As such, I have been tasked with selecting equipment, and outlining test procedures.

Part 1 is done :P

Part 2 I'm having a little difficulty as I'm new to the whole research environment. Want I need help with is the following: I need to be able to measure packet transmit/arrival times (on-air times) packet collisions, and source / destination information. I have a vague idea in my head of how I want to proceed, but would like to confirm with those who might know better.
I am thinking of setting up some wireless sniffers (Linux laptops) at various spots throughout the test-field. I would put these laptop cards in promiscuous mode and run Ethereal as the packet-capture software. As I need very detailed information on *ALL* packets being transmitted (even the layer-2 management frames) what hitches might I run into with this setup?

I would also like to remotely change the wireless settings for the unit deployed in this trial. I have tried (rather unsuccessfully) to install net-snmp and get an 802.11 MIB (under Linux).
Does anybody have any 'general' configuration tool (usable on a number of different wireless NICs) to be able to configure wireless nodes? I know that I once used a tool for Senao bridges provided by Demarctech that could do this (but only for the Senao product).


Any suggestions / comments?

Thanks!