I have been tinkering with my old ASUS A43SV as my home server that serve several services that I have and host on (news.benyamin.xyz and op.benyamin.xyz). This server use a special layer 2 network emulation with ZeroTier as it’s backend and I’m expose it to the internet (for my personal hoby). The problem is sometimes I need to check the connection as I living in a boarding house with shared internet connection. I do have RDP/XRDP connection to the computer, but sometimes I’m to lazy to check using RDP, so I think to find a serveral ways to check it using terminal.

I’m quite shocked to be honest that nmcli has it feature built in. In short you only need to run this command on terminal using ssh :

$ nmcli dev wifi list
IN-USE BSSID SSID MODE CHAN RATE SIGNAL BARS SECURITY
* 00:00:00:00:1A:00 A Infra 6 130 Mbit/s 59 ▂▄▆_ WPA2
00:00:00:00:87:00 T Infra 1 270 Mbit/s 47 ▂▄__ WPA2
00:00:00:00:D5:00 Q Infra 6 130 Mbit/s 47 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2
00:00:00:00:DB:00 N Infra 5 130 Mbit/s 45 ▂▄__ WPA1 WPA2


You will be presented with list of wifi networks and it’s strength, without need to do RDP/VNC. It’s very useful especially when sometimes I move that laptop aroun. I just need to ssh, run the command, and viola, it shown to me. I always never expect that nmcli from Red Hat become this mature, as in the past there are a lot of command involved and needed to just get the network connections status.

I hope this helps others, just for automation If you need one (you can wrap with using awk or other cli tools)