how to ping ip address of the connected access point?

could someone give me the command. I cannot find the command. Also where can I find the access point address? is it can be found from iwconfig access point? Lastly how can I know if it replies back with high throughput (802.11n) bitrates?

3 Answers

could someone give me the command. I cannot find the command.

This is because no such commands exists. An accesspoint is a L2 device. It doesn't need to care about IP, which is layer 3. The accesspoint cares about transporting frames, and converting between WLAN frames and Ethernet frames.

In many typical home routers, the access point and router is a combined device. In this case you can find the IP of the device by looking at default route:

$ ip route
default via 10.0.3.1 dev wlan0 proto dhcp metric 600
10.0.3.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.3.48 metric 600 

In this case the default gateway is 10.0.3.1. In my case, this is a pfsense firewall and router, whilst the AP is a Ubiquiti that has an IP of 10.0.1.133.

The access point, when your PC is connected to it, is addressable at the "gateway" ip address, which you can find by typing ip route | grep "default" and looking at the "via " part of the output. There may be multiple lines of output in a more complicated network setup but you can identify the correct line by matching the network interface name after the "dev" keyword to your interface: "wlp3s0".

Sample output for an ethernet connected PC:

default via 192.168.0.1 dev eno1 proto static metric 100

Try pinging this address. It is usually the first address of the private network's subnet, which is usually 192.168.0.1 for most personal routers.

1. Find the ip address:

   ip address show [wifi interface]

2. Ping the device:

   ping address

3. Information about wifi:

   iwconfig [wifi interface]

   • Sample information:

     wlp3s0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"AndroidAP" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 70:5A:AC:30:7C:D0 Bit Rate=72.2 Mb/s Tx-Power=22 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:on Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-38 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:34 Missed beacon:0