Garrett Bluma » Apple http://garrettbluma.com Web Developer Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:23:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 AirPort Scanning from Bash http://garrettbluma.com/2011/09/25/airport-scanning-from-bash/ http://garrettbluma.com/2011/09/25/airport-scanning-from-bash/#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:00:57 +0000 Garrett Bluma http://garrettbluma.com/?p=932 In the process of writing Monitor Your Web Services form Bash, I realized that there are a few commands that I use in a similar way — why not share them?!

In Mac OS X you often interact with wireless networks via the top-menu, but you also have access via command-line.

In this above view you can see the signal strength and that it only gives you 5 different values. This is good enough for a casual observation, but for other purposes we may need something better — enter the command line!

1. Scanning the network

$ export PATH=$PATH:/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources

$ airport -s

    SSID BSSID             RSSI CHANNEL HT CC SECURITY (auth/unicast/group)
2WIRE442 3c:ea:4f:cb:a9:a9 -86  6       N  US WEP
      gb 00:25:4b:07:3f:8d -65  2       Y  US WPA2(PSK/AES/AES)

2. Viewing Current Connection Strength

$ airport -I

     agrCtlRSSI: -71
     agrExtRSSI: 0
    agrCtlNoise: -94
    agrExtNoise: 0
          state: running
        op mode: station
     lastTxRate: 104
        maxRate: 130
lastAssocStatus: 0
    802.11 auth: open
      link auth: wpa2-psk
          BSSID: 0:25:4b:7:3f:8d
           SSID: gb
            MCS: 13
        channel: 2

3. Watching the current connection strength in real-time

Updates twice a second with the details above output. I find this very useful when I'm curious about how

$ watch -n 0.5 airport -I
]]> http://garrettbluma.com/2011/09/25/airport-scanning-from-bash/feed/ 0 MacBook Wireless Problems Caused by 10.5.8 Update http://garrettbluma.com/2009/08/12/macbook-wireless-problems-caused-by-10-5-8-update/ http://garrettbluma.com/2009/08/12/macbook-wireless-problems-caused-by-10-5-8-update/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:38:24 +0000 Garrett Bluma http://www.garrettbluma.com/2009/08/12/macbook-wireless-problems-caused-by-10-5-8-update/ Problem:

Built-in wireless on MacBook (and possibly MacBook Pro) is unable to connect to any wireless devices following an update to OS X (10.5.8 -- released Aug 5, 2009)

Connection issues include not being able to connect to a wireless network ("Connection Timeout") and high amounts of packet loss.

Solution:

Apple released a patch to fix this issue, just run software update (in System Preferences) and make sure you install the package that is like "AirPort performance while on battery power". This will undo the bug they introduced in the 10.5.8.

That did it for me.

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