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TL;DR: wavemon does not work, iwconfig works fine.


problem

I don't seem to get any results from wavemon, although it sees the right interface.

If I start wavemon

$ sudo wavemon

it shows for Interface:

wlan0 (IEEE 802.11bgn), phy 0, reg: n/a

After the dynamic info update interval, it adds some info on WPA/WPA2:

wlan0 (IEEE 802.11bgn, WPA/WPA2), phy 0, reg: n/a

Also, it sees my Network: wlan0 (UP RUNNING BROADCAST MULTICAST), mac address, qlen (1000), ip and mtu.

However, in the Levels panel, it just says

NO INTERFACE DATA

The Scan window (F3) says:

Scan trigger failed on wlan0: No such device

And I have no statistics.

research

I found this question, but it does not solve my problem for two reasons: 1) I already started wavemon as sudo and 2) I can use iwconfig just fine. It says:

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0
[sudo] password for mk:
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"<my essid>"  Nickname:"rtl_wifi"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.462 GHz  Access Point: 01:23:45:67:89:ab
          Bit Rate:72 Mb/s   Sensitivity:0/0
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:****-****-****-****-****-****-****-****   Security mode:open
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=97/100  Signal level=61/100  Noise level=0/100
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

(ESSID and Access Point censored)

I also read under Dependencies on the github source page README.md something about CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT. However, I read somewhere else that also iwconfig should depend on this. Therefore, I expect it is no solution for me.

info

I am on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS with LXDE and use wavemon 0.8.0 with ncurses 6.0.20160213. The USB WLAN adapter is a 0bda:8172 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8191SU 802.11n (taken from lsusb). Its configuration (from sudo lshw -class network) is broadcast=yes driver=r8712u ip=192.168.2.100 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn

After installing wavemon, I have rebooted the system.

From dmesg | grep -i firmware I read one related line:

[   16.880896] usb 1-5: r8712u: Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"

The network is managed by NetworkManager v1.2.6.

Happy to provide more info where needed (but where to start?)


What I would ultimately want, is diagnose my situation where WiFi is sometimes fast (at least, reasonable as expected, topping at 10Mb/s) and sometimes VERY slow, often reconnecting. I am two floors up (with one layer of enforced concrete) from the router, a WRT160NL, sending wireless-N only. The antennae are pointer sideways to maximize throughput, as is the antenna of the adapter. I expect the distance to be a possible cause, although iwconfig and /proc/net/wireless usually report a link quality of 90-100/100 and a signal level of ~70/100. I'd like to look into this a bit further.

1 Answer 1

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Does iw dev wlan0 scan produce any result? If not then it seems your driver does not support the new wireless networking API. Try an older version of wavemon v0.7.6

https://github.com/uoaerg/wavemon/issues/13

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  • 1
    Installing an older version from pkgs.org (the one from Ubuntu 14.04) actually worked. Wavemon is now running as expected. Dec 31, 2018 at 8:59

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