How detecting the Wifi area my iwi0 is in?

[Matthias Apitz]

Hello,

I'm travelling a lot around with my FreeBSD 6.2 laptop and have
all kind of WLAN environments in the different offices and another
one at home as well. At the moment I'm using a small shell script
which must be run as root after boot to set the correct Wifi
context (WPA or WEP, keys, IP addrs), as well routing, DNS and
other stuff (DHCP is not present always). That's why I was thinking
in doing that automagically on the fly with a better script and based on
the SSID of the different AP. But I can't see a stable and reliable
way to figure out the SSID with ifconfig. I've just tried in my
office after a fresh re-boot:

# ifconfig iwi0 
iwi0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        ether 00:13:ce:a1:e6:81
        media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect
        status: no carrier
        ssid "" channel 1
        authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpowmax 100 bmiss 10 protmode CTS
# ifconfig iwi0 scan chanlist 1-20

'ifconfig' returned immediately and does not show any AP

# ifconfig iwi0 list ap

no AP shown

# ifconfig iwi0 up
# ifconfig iwi0 scan chanlist 1-20
# ifconfig iwi0 list ap
SSID            BSSID              CHAN RATE  S:N   INT CAPS
NETGEAR         00:18:4d:65:61:12    6   54M 42:0   100 EP   WPA
XXXXXXXXXXXXX   xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx    9   54M 53:0   100 EP   xxxxxx

now my AP XXXXXXXXXXXXX appeared.

But sometimes even a 'ifconfig iwi0 up' does not help. So, what
is the correct way of getting the list of AP after a fresh boot?

Another question: I could grep from the attic an older laptop
(Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook C1020) and will install CURRENT
on it for testing some stuff. The laptop has not Wifi on board.
Are there any PCMCIA based Wifi cards working with FreeBSD?

Thx

	matthias
-- 
Matthias Apitz
Manager Technical Support - OCLC PICA GmbH
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