Hello, I just want to share here. Hopefully it’s useful. Thanks

  • @tills13
    link
    4
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    Out of curiosity is there an analogous utility for if you are using networkd instead of NetworkManager?

    Aside from parsing proc wireless…

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      23 months ago

      iw dev <interface> station dump will show every metric about the connection, including the signal strength and average signal strength.

      It won’t show it as an ascii graphic as with nmcli, but it shouldn’t be hard to create a wrapper script to grep that info and convert it to a simplified output if you’re willing to put in the effort of understanding the dBm numbers.

      E.g. -10 dBm is the maximum possible and -100 dBm is the minimum (for the 802.11 spec), but the scale is logarithmic so -90 dBm is 10x stronger than the absolute minimum needed for connectivity, and I can only get ~-20 dBm with my laptop touching the AP.

      Basically my point is that the good ol’ “bars” method of demonstrating connection strength was arbitrarily decided and isn’t closely tied to connection quality. This way you get to decide what numbers you want to equate to a 100% connection.

  • @wallybeavis
    link
    English
    33 months ago

    TiL. I’m going to have to play around with this, thank you!

  • @h0bbl3s
    link
    13 months ago

    Thanks that’s good to learn!

    • @leo85811nardo
      link
      33 months ago

      Because the machine could be headless so it can’t display the applet to click on

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      13 months ago

      It’s as other said, headless. Sometimes I only need to check if the signal strength is alright, as I use that machine as servers and host several service on it.