From the Canyon Edge: Bikeshed: wifi-status (monitor your wifi connection)

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Bikeshed: wifi-status (monitor your wifi connection)

I work from coffee shops, pubs, and conferences quite a bit. That means lots and lots and lots of of WiFi.

Modern Ubuntu desktops have a handsome indicator applet with an animation that shows the connection process.

But I'm a geek, and I need to know in more detail what's happening with my wireless connection, especially when it seems like it's taking forever to get a wireless connection.

For this, I wrote a utility called wifi-status that's now in bikeshed. Run this from a terminal and you'll see both the iwconfig and ifconfig status of your wireless interface.


wifi-status

Every 1.0s: iwconfig wlan0; ifconfig wlan0                                                                                                                  Fri Oct 15 14:07:49 2010

wlan0     IEEE 802.11abg  ESSID:"CampusCoffeeBean1"
      Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:24:7B:21:90:A0
      Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=14 dBm
      Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
      Power Management:off
      Link Quality=64/70  Signal level=-46 dBm
      Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
      Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:11:22:33:44:55
      inet addr:192.168.0.2  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      inet6 addr: fe80::221:6aff:fe50:a606/64 Scope:Link
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
      RX packets:1820355 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:2068354 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
      RX bytes:620541137 (620.5 MB)  TX bytes:1581840633 (1.5 GB)

If you find this useful, install the bikeshed package from Natty, or from the Bikeshed PPA for other versions of Ubuntu.

:-Dustin

1 comment:

GregOctober 22, 2010 at 12:13 PM
Yes but what color will we paint the bike shed?

Sorry I couldn't resist.
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Please do not use blog comments for support requests! Blog comments do not scale well to this effect.

Instead, please use Launchpad for Bugs and StackExchange for Questions.
* bugs.launchpad.net
* stackexchange.com

Thanks,
:-Dustin

About the Author

Dustin Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.

With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.

Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.

Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).

Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.

Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.

Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.

Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.

Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Bikeshed: wifi-status (monitor your wifi connection)

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