i'm continously working on adding more information. trying to achieve some kind of cheat sheet for debugging wireless connections from the shell, especially for LEDE devices.

listing information

ifconfig lists the network interface. unfortunately it does not provide any physical properties like the theoretical network speed or the MCS index:

ifconfig

iw is the configuration utitlity for wireless devices.

list phy or dev interfaces:

iw phy
iw dev

list current information such as theoretical network speed, MCS index, signal quality, SNR and more. replace wlan2 with the name of your network:

iw dev wlan2

scan manually for interfaces:

iwlist wlan2 scan

LEDE uses a script called wifi. this script is run after starting the device and enables the wpa_supplicant daemons which connect to the configured wifi networks:

wifi up
wifi down

connecting manually to an access point (no password)

wifi down

iwconfig wlan2 essid $SSID
ifconfig wlan2 up
ifconfig wlan2 192.168.100.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

more information about connecting manually: askubuntu: How to connect and disconnect.

wpa_supplicant

is a supplicant which handles network authentication
more information about wpa_supplicant

hostapd

is a userspace daemon which enables wireless access points and authentication.

work in progress