Re: wireless network detection/processing in net/gkrellm-wireless help needed

[christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)]

In article <23299.1290951953%jade.coe.psu.ac.th@localhost>,
Robert Elz  <tech-pkg%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>I'm sending this to tech-net and tech-pkg, as it concerns a package in pkgsrc
>(net/gkrellm-wireless) but needs assistance from someone who understands
>NetBSD's wireless (802.11) infrastructure.   Replies to tech-pkg only
>please (Reply-To is set, but I know many mailers mostly ignore that).
>
>Basically, gkrellm-wireless identifies 802.11 interfaces, and provides
>an easy (for gkrellm users anyway) interface to the basic stats (particularly
>signal strength, etc).
>
>The way it identifies wireless interfaces on NetBSD is "quaint" - it just
>looks at the interface name, and if it is wi%d then it is a wireless
>interface, otehrwise it is not ...   (the last time I tried, my wi (wavelan)
>interface cards had all stopped working in NetBSD, pcmcia support seems to
>have bit rotted, so this way of determining what is wireless is rather
>sub-optimal).   Nor would adding a list of every other interface name that
>we believe to be a wireless interface (ath iwn wpi rum ...) a rational
>approach.
>
>I assume there is some nice interface ioctl that wireless interfaces
>support, and others don't, that could be used to apply to any random
>interface name (getting the list of interfaces is not an issue) and
>which would only work for 802.11 interfaces (even if it works for just
>most 802.11 it would be considerably better than what we currently have.)

SIOCGIFMEDIA?

>Once identified, the code needs to extract the relevant stats - I suspect
>the way this is done is sub-optimal as well, but as I currently never
>get that far, I'm not sure whether it would work, or not.

What kind of stats does it need?

>If anyone has time to look at this, that would be great, if not, a
>suggestion what approach to take would be appreciated, and I'll see
>if I can make it work.

What does the package do?

christos