Is my network card compatible?

[Kaotik]

Hey Guys,

Having been searching around these forums and the general web on how to get all this working i got to the point where i know what i am doing.

I would like some confirmation please on the screenshot below whether my wireless adapter is compatible for sniffing? I am using VMware Workstation with Backtrack 4. It doesn't seem to be working as intended having random channel numbers, power and beacons going extremely high then some networks not showing up correctly whereas on my other network card shows all networks with 'Chuliganai' being the strongest.



Thanks. :)

[Snayler]

Hard to provide you with an answer without knowing said card's brand and model. Are you asking if it will be able to sniff traffic or if it supports injection?

[xX_Spiidey_Xx]

It doesn't seem to be working as intended having random channel numbers, power and beacons going extremely high then some networks not showing up correctly whereas on my other network card shows all networks with 'Chuliganai' being the strongest.

The random channel numbers "phenomenon" you are experiencing is called frequency hopping (or just hopping). To get this to stop, you'll need to pass additional arguments to airodump-ng such as -c <channel> or --bssid <bssid>to fix your card on one frequency/target in the spectrum.

As for knowing if it's supported, well... I don't know what you're trying to use. Run an aireplay-ng -9 wlanX (where X is your wlan #) to see if your card supports packet injection. Other methods would be to search the internets for keywords like: aircrack-ng suite card compatibility list <Name, make and model of my card here>. Maybe you'll find a wiki with listed support and levels of support for certain cards.

[Kaotik]

Thanks for the replies.

I have since installed Backtrack 4 as a dual-boot as i installed a old PCI WiFi card i had spare and this cannot be used on a virtual machine. Now i get great results using airodump-ng and aircrack-ng.

After an hour of data (30000) aircrack was unable to find the key, would you say this is fairly normal? I was thinking of leaving it running overnight while i sleep so it collects a good few hours worth of data and the traffic seems to have picked up on the target network.

The WiFi card i was using before is actually some form of internal USB micro built into my desktop made by 'Azurewave Technologies. Inc.' The PCI card i just installed has an Atheros AR5213 chip and that's the one i am using with result.

[Snayler]

An hour and you got only that? That's odd...

Ok, just found this:

Ath5k works fine here with AR5213 & latest wireless-testing kernel, but injection is slow (about 50-100pps, anything higher results in no return packets captured)

You could set the WEP key to the minimum length so that you can crack it with less packets required. Also, have you turned on the -z option on aircrack-ng command?