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