[clug] How to Determine which Wireless Lan is connected

David Schoen neerolyte at gmail.com
Tue Sep 29 05:49:30 MDT 2009


2009/9/29 Alex (Maxious) Sadleir <maxious at gmail.com>:
> As root, you can easily see this in the output of the iwconfig/iwgetid
> command. These commands aren't accessable as a normal user usually but
> you can make a user group and give it extra priviledges to the
> /sbin/iw* files for that if you need to.

Really? On Ubuntu everyone has access:

jail at gibble:~$ iwconfig wlan1 | head -1
wlan1     IEEE 802.11bg  ESSID:"Alan"
jail at gibble:~$ ls -l `which iwconfig`
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 26968 2008-11-15 08:21 /sbin/iwconfig
jail at gibble:~$ groups jail
jail
jail at gibble:~$

Assuming I went and set o-x on /sbin/iwconfig I'd have to stick myself
in the "root" group or chgrp /sbin/iwconfig to something new and fun.
I'd consider both to be worse hacks than just "chmod o+x `which
iwconfig`" (which has its own issues if the distro isn't setting that
value). Does your distro set some other group on the binary?

Cheers,
Dave


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