On Sat, Feb 08, 2014 at 08:07:47PM +0000, Thomas Pircher wrote:
On Saturday 08 February 2014 12:09:15 Chris Green wrote:
Are there any tools specifically for scanning/characterising WiFi signals and/or are there any replacements for Network Manager that make handling WiFi connections easier?
You could do a scan from command line (as root):
iw DEVICE scan
where DEVICE is your wifi interface name, most likely wlan0. You can see your interfac(es) with "iw dev". Look in the Interface section for each phyX.
iw wasn't installed, I've installed it now, it does produce a lot of output doesn't it! I had already discovered 'iwlist <Device> scan' but it also produces *too much* output. When there are dozens of Wifi signals out there it produces so much output that it's difficult to handle. I was actually seriously thinking of writing a script to use iwlist and filter the output down to the few items I want to know about.
The output for *one* WiFi signal is:- Cell 03 - Address: 00:AC:54:CA:2C:FA Channel:1 Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1) Quality=27/70 Signal level=-83 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"BTHub3-QFZJ" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s Bit Rates:24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=00000020199d4d9e Extra: Last beacon: 19368ms ago IE: Unknown: 000B4254487562332D51465A4A IE: Unknown: 010882848B960C121824 IE: Unknown: 030101 IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 32043048606C IE: Unknown: 2D1AAC011BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1601080000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 4A0E14000A002C01C800140005001900 IE: Unknown: 7F0101 IE: WPA Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: DD180050F20201018A0003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 IE: Unknown: DD0900037F01010000FF7F IE: Unknown: DDA70050F204104A000110104400010210570001001041000100103B00010310470010565AA94967C14C0EAA8FF349E6F5931110210002425410230017486F6D652048756220332E30204D756C7469204D6F646510240010425420486F6D652048756220332E3041104200122B3035383732302B313230363030313038361054000800060050F204000110110010425420486F6D652048756220332E3041100800020084103C000101
The output of the scan can look a bit complicated, but you would be most interested in the WPS, WPA and RSN sections of the output.
Yes, iw does tell one more about the encryption than iwlist. I can see a script using both iwlist and iw taking shape. Thanks for the reply.