Re: nm api to get essid, freq, qual ...

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 04:03 -0400, tyuoustwo three wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have already looked at
> http://lists.shmoo.com/pipermail/hostap/2007-December/016761.html
> message. 
> 
> I would like to know, if  api's in nm-device-802-11-wireless.c in
> NetworkManager/src or nm-device-802-11-wireless.c in
> NetworkManager/libnm-glib can be used to get essid, frequency and
> quality.

They are accessible both from libnm-glib and from D-Bus, since
libnm-glib is really just a client-side wrapper around the D-Bus
interface that NM exposes.

You can also query wpa_supplicant for this information directly.

Are you looking for information about which AP the machine is
_currently_ associated with, or information about some random known AP
that the machine is _not_ currently associated with?

> I am trying to overlay network information (essid, freq ...) on a live
> video stream. 
> Using "system(iwlist ath0 scan | grep ESSID > net_info.txt)"  and
> then 

This is going to just kill you, because you're scanning for networks,
which can take more than 10 seconds on cards that support both the A and
B/G frequency bands, using a passive scan (which is the default).  You
really, really don't want to trigger a scan every frame.

So first I'll need to know if you want info about the current associated
AP or a known but not currently associated AP.  That makes a big
difference in the approach you should take.

Dan

> reading the file each millisecond or less takes a lot of time. (For
> each single video frame using "system" command to get network
> parameters and then overlaying text makes the live video really
> slow). 
> 
> So, looking for an api that directly provides the required wireless
> network parameters.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ash
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