By the way, if you want to give your network interfaces useful names like "wired", "wireless", "firewire", etc., you can use the "ifrename" service which we covered back in meeting 25. Probably the better way nowadays is to use udev rules, but we'll try to cover that in a future meeting. Now to cause the wireless NIC to scan for available networks, you have to have root priviledges, so to scan for available access points use the following command.

sudo iwlist wireless scanning

and I get the following output when I do this from my house.

wireless  Scan completed :
		Cell 01 - Address: 00:0F:66:BB:05:60
			ESSID:"linksys"
			Mode:Master
			Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
			Signal level:16/153  Noise level:8/153
			Encryption key:off
			Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s
		Cell 02 - Address: 00:0D:88:9B:54:78
			ESSID:"odom"
			Mode:Master
			Frequency:2.447 GHz (Channel 8)
			Signal level:60/153  Noise level:9/153
			Encryption key:on
			Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s

As we can see from the output, I have two access points in range of my computer; my home access point with the ESSID "odom" and some neighbor's access point with ESSID "linksys". No anyone who knows about wireless routers/access points would know that this is a completely unconfigured, wide open wireless access point and they could completely exploit this fact, but we are moral people and we will take the high road, right? You can also see the modes, frequencies, signal/noise, available bit rates and whether the access points have encryption turned on or not. If you want to know more about any of these fields, like the mode (which is actually very interesting), read the man page for iwconfig.