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:

  1. Yes but what color will we paint the bike shed?

    Sorry I couldn't resist.

    ReplyDelete

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
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Thanks,
:-Dustin