WiFi Access Point Discovery Tools ?

[Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko]

On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 20:24 -0500, Gary E. RAFE, Ph.D. wrote:
> Dan Pelleg <daniel+fbsdm at pelleg.org> wrote:
> 
> !It definitely works for me, using either a builtin mini-PCI (intel card
> !using ipw) or PCCARD (lucent or US-robotics cards using wi). Further, I
> !hardly ever need to do that manually since dhclient usually just DTRT for
> [...]
> 
> OK, that's interesting.
> So, theoretically, "wicontrol -i wiX -L" should list access points
> that are within range of the WiFi device...
> What kind of output should I expect from this ?
> 
> My kernel has "device wlan" and "device wi" compiled in
> (I believe, since I'm away from notebook just now);
> is anything else needed (kernel or userland) for "-L" to work ?
> --
> Gary E. RAFE, Ph.D.	<mailto:rafege at mail.com>
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I do not have wi card handy to produce sample output, but from my
recollection it is not any different:

RabbitsDen# wicontrol -i ndis0 -l
2 stations:
ap[0]:
        netname (SSID):                 [ YYYYYYYYYYYYY ]
        BSSID:                          [ 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ]
        Channel:                        [ 6 ]
        Quality/Signal/Noise [signal]:  [ 85 / 85 / 0 ]
                                [dBm]:  [ 85 / -64 / -149 ]
        BSS Beacon Interval [msec]:     [ 0 ]
        Capinfo:                        [ ]
ap[1]:
        netname (SSID):                 [ XXXXXXXXXXXXXX ]
        BSSID:                          [ 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ]
        Channel:                        [ 11 ]
        Quality/Signal/Noise [signal]:  [ 83 / 83 / 0 ]
                                [dBm]:  [ 83 / -66 / -149 ]
        BSS Beacon Interval [msec]:     [ 0 ]
        Capinfo:                        [ WEP ]
RabbitsDen#

SSID and BSSID have been X'ed out on purpose. One on the top is my
neighbor's station, one on the bottom is mine (one I am associated with
at the moment). Devices wlan and wlan_wep are compiled into the kernel,
if_ndis is loaded. Oh yeah, please notice lowercase 'el'. With uppercase
'el' I will get loads of info on the station I am associated with, so
man page disagrees with wicontrol.

I am running -current as of couple of weeks ago, but I believe that
above worked for me at least since 5.2.1 days (I have been wrong before
though ;).

HTH,
-- 
Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko (Олександр Коваленко)