Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 06:59:06 +1300 From: Andrew Thompson <thompsa@FreeBSD.org> To: Jordan Coleman <jordan@JordanColeman.com> Cc: freebsd-embedded@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Programmatic access to 802.11 info Message-ID: <20080403175906.GB29676@heff.fud.org.nz> In-Reply-To: <8C45E249-2E03-4F70-B3C2-E28A92EEFB05@JordanColeman.com>
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On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 01:09:01PM -0400, Jordan Coleman wrote:
> We are currently working on an embedded application that need to connect to
> wireless networks. The UI lets the user configure one or more networks,
> select whether to use a specific network or roam among a list of SSIDs,
> view SSID scan information etc. We are wrapping wpa_supplicant and letting
> it handle network selection, roaming, WPA (as well as WEP), etc. and that
> seems to work well enough. However, at the moment, we're having trouble
> getting various status information in a reliable and efficient manner.
>
> Our temporary code invokes "ifconfig -v <dev> list scan" and scrapes its
> output to get scanning info (it appears to provide more and better info
> than wpa_supplicant's 'scan results' command). Similarly, we're scraping
> "wpa_cli status" and "ifconfig <dev> list sta" for association and signal
> strength information. At best, this seems like the hard way to get this
> info and it's darn ugly, too (polling sucks, but having to fork and exec
> ifconfig on every poll sucks even more). What's more, some of the
> information we want, such as signal quality ("n out of 5 bars", etc.),
> isn't really available. We can get RSSI from "ifconfig list sta", but it's
> not the same thing.
>
> So can anyone suggest how to go about getting this information straight
> from the system? The application is primarily written in Perl, but Perl is
> not a hard requirement for this portion of the code. The device runs
> FreeBSD 7 and the wireless hardware is Atheros-based. So far, I've been
> unsuccessful in finding helpful docs and the FreeBSD wireless code is big
> enough to make grokking it a challenge.
The best reference is the ifconfig code itself. Have a look at
src/sbin/ifconfig/ifieee80211.c
Andrew
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