Hey guys and welcome back. So now what I want to do is to turn your attention to the concept
of wireless networks. Now for the L-PIC 2 examination we really don't have to understand
wireless in too great a detail and this is I suppose pretty fortunate because when you happen to have
a virtual machine setup the ability to be able to practice wireless commands is kind of off limits.
For example if I happen to do my ifconfig command if you actually notice here my interface is apparently
an ethernet interface this is actually not true what I'm connecting to is to my wireless router
in the house so I actually have a wireless connection going on here but because I'm using a
virtual machine it's actually being presented to my operating system as an ethernet interface so
unless you happen to be working on a real Linux device connecting to a wireless network the commands
that I'm going to talk to you about well you're not going to be able to get any meaningful information
from due to the nature of this virtualization. Now like I say the good news is is that we just
have to have a basic understanding of wireless networks for the L-PIC 2 examination. The commands
I'm going to talk to you about we don't actually have to understand in any great detail we just
have to understand their general purpose so that is exactly what we'll just focus in on within this
nugget. Now obviously I am assuming in 2022 which is the year in which I am recording this I am
hoping you as an IT enthusiast have actually heard of a wireless network in fact you probably are
using one right now but despite this let me just highlight some of the terminology we want to be
aware of one is called an access point otherwise known as a wireless access point and we want to
know what this concept is because it does relate to one of the commands I want to talk to you about.
Now all a wireless accent point does it allows us to effectively connect an un-wired network to a
wired network. The way the setup is going right now in my house I have my little laptop here
within my laptop I have a wireless network card that allows me to make a wireless connection
and within my house I have one of these access points and that can pick up that signal so I can
talk to the access point and the access point has a wire which is connected to my home router so
really I talk wirelessly to my AP my AP is wired and connected into my router and my home
router connection has a fiber connection to my ISP so simply put I can walk around my house with my
laptop so long as I am within range of the access points and that will allow me to join my un-wired
connection i.e this portion of the network join that to the wired portion without me over here
having to be plugged in now again I am pretty sure that what I'm talking about is pretty familiar
to many of you watching so with that said how about we talk about these two commands that we
want to be aware of the first command is the IWconfig command this is kind of like the IFconfig
command the difference here is that this is related to wireless connections hence the W so really if
you happen to have a wireless network interface card within your computer which I actually do
even though my Linux machine is not displaying this as a virtual machine if you have such a card in
and you issue the IWconfig command on your Linux machine what this is going to do is going to
display the settings and the parameters for that particular wireless interface so since I actually
can't issue the command what I've done is I've got an image of what this command output would look
like we can see the interfaces on the left we can see the look back interface we can see the wireless
LAN interface wireless LAN 0 and similar to the IFconfig we can see information relating to
transmit statistics and received statistics we can get a link quality score the signal level
we can see the ESSID what this is is the extended service set identification quite simply this is
the name given to the wireless device that you're connecting to so that it can be found and differentiated
from other potential wireless networks and just like with the IFconfig command the IWconfig command
does not just print out information you can actually make modifications and changes to the wireless
configuration via this command if you so choose but again the details of that is outside the scope
of the examination now the other command I want to give a brief mention to that we want to be aware
of is the IWList command and this command actually has a very particular setting which is of great
use to us and this is the IWListScan command what this command will actually do it will allow you
to scan for wireless devices within your local range so if you happen to execute this command
you will see all the wireless devices which are answering back within your range you'll get information
such as the ESSID which we just talked about so not just the one that you're actually connected to
these are just ones that are out there that you could potentially connect to you'll get the MAC
information of that access point as well as a whole bunch of other information such as the
type of encryption that it's using and the channel information as well as the exact frequency it's
using so really the commands we want to be remembering for the purposes of the examination
is the IWconfig command that will allow us to display our current wireless settings as well as
modify those settings if we so need and we also have the IWListScan command which will allow us to
scan for and then list the wireless networks nearby that we could potentially connect to
and could potentially use as a wireless access point and really those are the main bullet points
that we want to be remembering for the purposes of the LPIC2 examination okay dogs so I hope this
has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing