Yesterday I took my iBook to university for the first time to test the new 802.11g accesspoints and the WLAN stumblers for Mac OS X. The result was disappointing. I tried KisMAC, Macstumbler and iStubmler. None of them was able to discover the university’s WLAN, although I was connected to it. I guess this is because the Airport Extreme Card only works in passive mode, because it is a Broadcom chip. And Broadcom sucks regarding release of specs.
Another lack of MacOS X, I couldn’t find any information about Signal strengh and at what connection speed i am connected to the Accesspoint. On FreeBSD wicontrol(8) and ifconfig(8) give me all the information I need. But I have found no equivalent on MacOS X.
The ifconfig output looks really poor compared to FreeBSD’s:
# ifconfig en1 en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 inet6 fe80::20a:95ff:fef7:1d4c prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5 inet 192.168.1.24 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255 ether 00:0a:95:f7:1d:4c media: autoselect status: active supported media: autoselect