[asterisk-users] OT: Question about Wifi sniffing on network

[randulo]

Most of you have needed at one time or another to sniff network
traffic for trouble shooting purposes.

Today I noticed that one of my SIP phone's web interface worked much
faster with Opera, so I wanted to see what exactly was going on. I set
up Wireshark and toook a look, but I got distracted by the fact that I
saw a bunch of strange things coming from "FreeboxS_nn". I know my
neighbor uses Free and has this device and there are probably others
in the neighborhood as well. I'm seeing this on a wifi connection to a
Mac Mini. The SIP phone was a Gigaset S675IP. If you have any slowness
in the web gui, try Opera 10, it somehow talks very quickly to the
phone.

My question is this:

On a local network, there are devices like pronters that announce
themselves, files sharing, computers, servers, etc.

On a WiFi router, is it normal that it "reaches out" to try to talk to
devices? I'm seeing groups of packets a couple times a minute, it
seems like a lot. Is this normal or is it some kind of hack attempt or
honeypot within range of my computer?

Thanks for any relevant info.

/r