Can't hotplug device; don't know how to determine s/n ratio quickly
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I've been messing with a rtl8187 USB adapter and pfsense and have a couple nagging issues.
The device needs to be connected at boot and never disconnected, or else a reboot is required. The module seems to load just fine, but pfsense doesn't appear to be smart enough to reconfigure the device. The urtw0_wlan0 interface isn't created, either, IIRC.
This is a problem mostly because I use the same adapter with other machines to do things like reposition the antenna if the signal drops. It would help if I could get the signal info easily. Thus far, not being familiar with FreeBSD, the only method I know is:
ifconfig urtw0_wlan0 scan
which channel hops and is atrociously slow.
In Linux I just use iwconfig when in managed mode (or better yet airodump in monitor mode) and I quickly get those stats.
Any tips?
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If you are on pfSense 1.2.3, there is no _wlan0 interface - that is on 2.0 (FreeBSD 8.x based).
Either way, in the GUI, Status > Wireless should show signal strengths and I think there should be a wireless graph under the RRD graphs as well.
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The signal strength stats aren't updated when one reloads the page. They're the same stats as the scan command. It's worthless for my purposes.
I'm looking for a method to check the signal of a particular essid (or at least channel) live. I do not need a web interface for it.
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I'm not aware of any other way to check signal levels under FreeBSD than via ifconfig. I don't think wlandebug helps at all with signal strengths, and I don't think any of the driver sysctls do either.
