airport and wlan scan

[christophe barbe <christophe@cattlegrid.net>]

I have tested the  Moustafa Youssef patch to add the scan feature to the
orinoco driver. The patch can be found at:
   http://www.cs.umd.edu/~moustafa/morinoco/morinoco.html

This seems to add the scan feature to the airport driver. I have yet to
find a place with multiple wlan.

The output looks like:

~$ iwlist eth1 scan
Warning: Driver for device eth1 has been compiled with version 14
of Wireless Extension, while this program is using version 15.
Some things may be broken...
 
eth1      Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:30:56:18:72:5A
                    ESSID:"philly"
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.412GHz
                    Quality:14/92  Signal level:-80 dBm  Noise level:-95 dBm
                    Encryption key:off

The warning is related to the fact that the iwconfig tools are more
recent than the API provided by the kernel and is not related to the
patch (and is mostly harmless).

I wonder why this patch is not merged in the main driver.

Also I have no idea how to use iwlist without ifup the interface. I
guess it is possible to start the wireless card, scan the available wlan
and if one is present going forward by calling dhclient, but I have no
idea on how to do that.

Also I have not found an application (or script) that use this feature
to do some smart auto configuration of the network 'à la' Mac OS X.
It doesn't seems like an unreachable goal thought.

Christophe
 
-- 
Christophe Barbé <christophe.barbe@ufies.org>
GnuPG FingerPrint: E0F6 FADF 2A5C F072 6AF8  F67A 8F45 2F1E D72C B41E

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-- Albert Einstein