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Probe Software Installation

This section takes a look at how we install various additional required software packages on to our probe. This includes any pre-requisite software packages and the wiperf software itself.

WLAN Pi

Good news! If you're using a WLAN Pi (v2.x image), you already have the software required (it's part of the WLAN Pi software image). Go to the next section of this documentation site.

Note

New in V2.1: For SMB test support or to use Librespeed for speedtest, you will need to install a couple of optional extra packages as detailed in these reference documents:

Raspberry Pi

The RPi requires a few pre-requisite Linux packages before we can install the wiperf software itself. Note that the probe must be connected to a network (via ethernet or wireless) that has access to the Internet to download the required code.

You will need CLI access to the probe to perform the steps detailed below.

Package Updates

Before we start adding pre-requisite packages, it's always a good idea to update the existing Linux packages on our RPi to make sure we have the "latest and greatest". This may take a few minutes to complete as many files may be downloaded & updated, depending on when/if your RPi was last updated:

# download & update latest Linux packages
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
# Reboot if any new packages were installed
sudo reboot

Pre-requisite Packages

Next, we need to install additional Linux packages that may not be included as part of the standard RPi distribution:

  • pip3
  • iperf3
  • git
  • curl
  • netcat

These are installed with the following CLI commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pip iperf3 git curl netcat -y
sudo reboot

Note

New in V2.1: For SMB test support or to use Librespeed for speedtest, you will need to install a couple of optional extra packages as detailed in these reference documents:

wiperf Software Installation

To install the wiperf code itself on to the RPi, execute the following CLI command:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wifinigel/wiperf/main/setup.sh | sudo bash -s install rpi

This will initiate the download and installation of a number of python packages, together with the wiperf code itself. This will take a few minutes to complete.

Once installation is complete, our final step is to configure the wiperf probe to perform the tests we'd like to run, and provide details of where the probe needs to send its data (i.e. our data server).


Last update: January 28, 2021