Link Monitoring in Linux with Wavemon

Link Monitoring in Linux with Wavemon

Monitor radio parameters in real time using Wavemon, a curses-based tool for Linux.

When using Linux, the standard wireless tools provide a wealth of status information. These tools get their information from the standard kernel interface /proc/net/wireless. While ideal for providing pinpoint accuracy in measuring signal strength and noise data, these tools are not designed to give an indication of performance over time.

Wavemon (http://www.wavemage.com/projects.html) is a terrific little tool that does precisely this. It polls /proc/net/wireless many times each second to give you a rolling report of how your wireless connection is performing. Its simple curses interface keeps the code quite small and is ideal for including in embedded distributions to get real-time link data from remote access points.

The main interface provides a nice graphical representation of the current link state (Figure).

Wavemon in action.

All of the statistics are updated in real time, making it ideal for monitoring point-to-point links and fine-tuning antennas on long distance shots. For an even easier to read display, hit F2 to bring up the Level Histogram (Figure).

Pretty little scrolling waves of data.

This display is easy to read on a laptop even in bright sunshine, making it an ideal tool for outdoor work. The histogram slowly sweeps to the left, giving you a history of the last few moments of wireless connectivity. Wavemon runs in a terminal, so you can easily run more than one instance to monitor multiple radio links simultaneously.

When you need a high performance signal and noise meter for Linux, Wavemon is hard to beat. The current version is available from Freshmeat at http://freshmeat.net/projects/wavemon/.

Rob Flickenger