horst
open-sourceThe section your link pointed to isn't on horst's page any more, so we've brought you to the top.
horst - lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer with a text interface - br101/horst
Summary
horst is an open-source IEEE802.11 WLAN analyzer with a text interface, licensed under GPL v2, run as a command-line tool on Linux against any wireless interface that supports monitor mode. It's aimed at people debugging wireless LANs — quick overviews of channel activity rather than deep packet inspection — and its README places it alongside tcpdump, Wireshark and Kismet while noting it is smaller and surfaces aggregated data those tools don't, like per-station signal values, channel utilization, and IBSS split detection for ad-hoc and mesh networks. It supports client/server operation for monitoring remote nodes and manages monitor interfaces automatically. First committed in 2007 with 16 contributors, it has had no commits in the past year, so treat it as stable but no longer actively maintained.
horst - lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer with a text interface - br101/horst
How horst helps
Which stations nearby have weak or flaky signal?
tracks per-station RSSI continuously, something most tools only give you in managed mode, so you can spot marginal links even in IBSS mode
Which channel should I move this network to?
sums the actual airtime each packet occupies per channel and reports it as a channel utilization figure, so busy versus idle channels are visible at a glance
Is this ad-hoc network actually one network or has it split?
watches for nodes sharing an ESSID but reporting different BSSIDs and flags it as an IBSS split, a known symptom of driver bugs in ad-hoc mode
What kind of traffic is actually filling the air on this channel?
breaks down packets and bytes by physical rate and packet type, so you can tell management overhead from real data load
Can I see what one specific device or access point is doing without the noise of everything else?
filters the live view down by packet type, mode, source address or BSSID before it renders the display
Can I watch a wireless interface on a box I'm not sitting at?
runs in a client/server mode where a remote node monitors its own interface and streams the aggregated data back, without you needing shell access there for the capture itself
Languages
Command line
| option | found in | since | description |
|---|
Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail horst puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
Nothing shipped since we started watching. Releases and docs updates land here as they happen.
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in br101/horst, 2023-12 – 2026-11, as of 2026-11-03. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 0 ±0 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed not measured of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close not measured issues closed, last 12 months
- Open backlog 13 of 74 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 13
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 424
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
Add the badge to your README
Maintain this project? The badge links readers straight to this page, so they can follow every release here.
Choose a badge style and copy the code →