orrinfacey01: 10.7: Monitor your Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Diagnostics

Thursday, August 25, 2011

10.7: Monitor your Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Diagnostics

Lion ships with an app called Wi-Fi diagnostics. It allows you to monitor Wi-Fi networks your computer is connected to and collect various kinds of information. This utility could be very useful for finding problems or doing research on your Wi-Fi networks.

The easiest way to launch Wi-Fi Diagnostics is to open it directly from the location /System/Library/CoreServices.

Once it launches, you get some options to choose from. As an example, let's use the first, Monitor Performance. Select that and click Continue.

You are given a live-updating graph of the signal/noise ratio of your network. This could be useful for live testing to find problems with interference. For example, turn on your coordless phone and see if your ratio worsens. If it does, move your router farther away from the phone.

The other options are also useful, allowing you to log events like people connecting and disconnecting, and allowing you to sample raw data sent acros ...