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

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:40:10 +0000 (UTC)
    From:        christos%astron.com@localhost (Christos Zoulas)
    Message-ID:  <icu0la$n6$1%dough.gmane.org@localhost>

  | SIOCGIFMEDIA?

Yes, that part doesn't look too hard.   Nor should it be.
(As suggested by gdt, and indirectly by the rodent, I have been
looking in ifconfig).

  | What kind of stats does it need?

I'm not exactly sure, but ...

  | What does the package do?

from pkg_info:

  gkrellmwireless is a plugin for gkrellm that shows the signal
  strength/quality/noise of a wireless ethernet card.

  Currently only wi(4) (Lucent ORiNOCO and derivatives) interfaces are 
supported.

  Homepage:
  http://gkrellm.luon.net/gkrellmwireless.phtml

The "Currently ..." is what I'd like to fix (that's also a NetBSD restriction,
on linux it does things different ways, and I suspect works better).   I've
never seen it work, as I don't have any functional wi cards (I believe my
cards are OK, but NetBSD doesn't handle them any more, or maybe it is the
newer carsbus bridge in pcmcia mode, or something - that is, it has never
worked in my current laptop, which is the only one I have access to that
still actually can plug in a pcmcia card).

But it should be a fairly simple gui like those other systems have that
shows how well the wireless signal is behaving (my laptop has a fairly
poor antenna design I believe, the orientation of the case makes a huge
difference to reliability - I currently manage that by keeping a ping
of the access point running, and seeing what orientation results in no
lost packets, but that's hardly an ideal mechanism!)

kre

ps: the netbsd handling in this comes from upstream, this isn't a pkgsrc
hack (though I guess the netbsd code was originally contributed by someone
from here, long long ago).