Troubleshooting Wireless Drivers

1. No Interface

• Stupid question: Is it a wireless card? (We’ve seen that several times)
• Is the device plugged in?
• Does it show up on lsusb or lspci (with the exception of phones)? You might want to update pci ids and usb ids
• Does dmesg contain any information about the driver loading and/or failing
• Is Kali a VM? Then, unless your card is USB, it will not be useable (VMWare/VirtualBox/QEMU will virtualize EVERY PCI device). Is it attached to the VM?
• If there is nothing in dmesg and it’s not in a VM, then you might want to try the latestcompat-wireless (and sometimes, you’ll need firmware) -> check on Linux-Wireless drivers

2. Interface But Can’t Do Anything

• Read error messages
• If there are no error messages, then run dmesg | tail and it will most likely tell you what’s wrong
• Firmware might be missing
• Check rfkill and any hardware switches and BIOS options

3. No Monitor Mode

• STA drivers (Ralink, Broadcom) and every other manufacturer’s provided driver doesn’t support monitor mode
• ndiswrapper doesn’t support monitor mode AND NEVER WILL.
• Airodump-ng/Wireshark don’t show any packets: check rfkill and any hardware switches and BIOS options

4. Injection

• Test with aireplay-ng -9 (Make sure the card is in monitor mode with airmon-ng)
• Airmon-ng doesn’t display chipset information: It’s not a big issue as it just didn’t get that information from the card and doesn’t change the abilities of your card
• No injection but monitor mode: Check rfkill and any hardware switches and BIOS options
• Network managers sometimes interfere with Aircrack tools. run airmon-ng check killto kill these processes.