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Wireless Hacks
book

Wireless Hacks

by Rob Flickenger
September 2003
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
304 pages
8h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Wireless Hacks

Link Monitoring in Linux with Wavemon

Monitor radio parameters in real time using Wavemon, a curses-based tool for Linux.

When using Linux, the standard wireless tools provide a wealth of status information. These tools get their information from the standard kernel interface /proc/net/wireless. While ideal for providing pinpoint accuracy in measuring signal strength and noise data, these tools are not designed to give an indication of performance over time.

Wavemon (http://www.wavemage.com/projects.html) is a terrific little tool that does precisely this. It polls /proc/net/wireless many times each second to give you a rolling report of how your wireless connection is performing. Its simple curses interface keeps the code quite small, and is ideal for including in embedded distributions (such as Pebble [Hack #53]) to get real-time link data from remote access points.

The main interface provides a nice graphical representation of the current link state (Figure 3-29).

Wavemon in action.

Figure 3-29. Wavemon in action.

All of the statistics are updated in real time, making it ideal for monitoring point-to-point links and fine-tuning antennas on long distance shots. For an even easier to read display, hit F2 to bring up the Level Histogram (Figure 3-30).

Pretty little scrolling waves of data.

Figure 3-30. Pretty little scrolling waves of data. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005598Catalog PageErrata