from ethernet to wifi

[Tim Chase]

On September 14, 2015, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> I don't yet know how to translate al of this,

I'll try to break down the bits I understand.  First, the easy two
are "lo" and "eth0" which tell you that there are "no wireless
extensions".  That's a no-brainer, since neither the loop-back nor
the wired adaptor are wireless.

Breaking down the various fields in the "wlan2" adapter:

"IEEE 802.11bgn"  This says your wireless card supports 802.11b,
802.11g (older & slower standards), and 802.11n (the best and most
recent standard)  Pretty standard stuff these days.

"ESSID: off/any"  Each wireless network has a "ESSID" ("extended
service set identification").  This is effectively the name of the
wireless network.  In your output, it isn't associated with a network
and is thus "off" or able to try to connect to "any" network.

"Mode: managed"   In a managed network, you have one Master node
(usually your wireless router) and a bunch of clients that connect to
it.  The common alternative to "managed" is "ad-hoc" which means that
it's more peer-to-peer in terms of negotiating various settings.
There's also a "monitor" mode which doesn't connect to anything but
rather just sniffs the traffic in the air.  For most common cases,
you want to leave this as "managed".

"Access Point: Not-Associated"  This is mostly duplicate information
since you are in managed mode, so if you were associated with an
access point, you'd also have an ESSID.

"Tx-Power=off"  Your radio is off and not transmitting.  When you
bring up the interface, this should give you information about how
much power it's using (mine currently shows "14 dBm")

Most of the other settings are small tweaks to the settings that
shouldn't impact your use unless you're in some sort of enterprise
setting.

Hope this helps,

-tim