Script for scanning for available wireless network

My current job deals with deploying wireless network (WiFi), and part of my job routine is to scan and get some details of the available access points (APs) in the area. This simple script is useful if one can’t get Kismet running, and also as in my case, when Kismet is considered an overkill for this simple task.

As my laptop is using Atheros wireless chipset, the kernel module to reload would be different if you’re using different chipset, and wlanconfig is an Atheros specific program and is available in madwifi-utils package (madwifi-ng-tools in Gentoo).

#!/bin/bash

echo "### Initializing driver.."
sudo modprobe -r ath_pci
sudo modprobe -r wlan_scan_sta
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo ifconfig ath0 down
sudo ifconfig ath0 up
echo "### Sleeping for 3 seconds before scanning.."
sleep 3
watch -n 1 "
        sudo wlanconfig ath0 list ap
        echo
        echo
        sudo iwlist ath0 scan
"

While iwlist gives more details on the scan result, wlanconfig‘s output is more brief and is more suitable if there are many wireless access points around (that it wouldn’t just fill up the screen). Combining these two, we get the best of both

I’ve been using sudo a lot in my scripts, and if you’re wondering won’t sudo be asking for passwords, well, by having this in my /etc/sudoers, the problem is solved;

shakir  ALL=(ALL)      NOPASSWD: ALL

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Information Insemination. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.