Although Linux is a pretty secure and flexible system, the truth is that by default it does not have a tool to monitor our wifi hardware. That is why in this post I will talk about a tool to do it called Wavemon: a wonderfull tool to monitoring wifi.
Wavemon is a CLI tool written in C and open source that provides information about our wifi hardware. The interesting thing about the tool is that it gives us detailed information about our hardware as well as the active wireless connection.
On the other hand, Wavemon is compatible with all hardware recognized by the Linux kernel. This means that if your wireless device is recognized and works well, you should have no problems with Wavemon.
Install Wavemon on Linux
Fortunately Wavemon is available on most Linux distributions through the official repositories. So installation should not be a problem.
If you use Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint or any derivative, just use the following command:
:~$ sudo apt install wavemon
On the contrary, if you use Manjaro, Arch Linux or other derivative, you only have to use pacman.
:~$ sudo pacman -S wavemon
If you use CentOS, the EPEL repository must be enabled and then installed.
In the case of fedora, if it is in the repositories and it is installed with the following command
:~$ sudo dnf install wavemon
However if you use another distribution, on the project’s Github site, there are instructions for compiling the program.
Monitoring WiFi with Wavemon is really easy
One of the main advantages of Wavemon is the great ease of use. Everything is visible. There are no tricks but everything is there.
Once you install it, you can run it from the terminal with the following command:
:~$ wavemon
As you can see in the image, there is a lot of useful information, perfectly displayed.
First of all, we have the interface information. There we will find the SSID of the active wifi connection.
We can also see the signal strength and quality. In my case, I am close to the wifi device so the quality is high.
Then, we will see a statistics section where we will see the sent and received packages.
In info we will obtain many more data like the time of connection, the frequency and the channel.
Finally, we will be able to see the mac address of our device as well as the public IP address.
As you can see, all easy and fast.
At the bottom we can access the other screens. If you press F2 or l you will see the following screen:
There you will see a histogram showing the signal level and strength of the network.
But Wavemon is flexible and has a preference screen:
And that’s how easy it is to use Wavemon.
If you want more information, you can check the wavemon man page in the terminal:
:~$ man wavemon
So, enjoy it.
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