USB wireless card...please help the confusion!

[Valkyrie]

The PWR shows the dBi and it's normal to be a negative number. If you see some wireless card data sheet you will notice that the sensibility is an negative number meaning that from -XX dBi your card will "hear" the AP. The greater the number, the closer you are: -50 is greater than -83.

thanks for the tip. After messing around all day with this card..Ive finally cracked my own WEP..

KEY FOUND! [ AB:CD:EF:12:34 ]

lol
I realise the mon0 VAP is created, but viewed some tutorials with wlan0 being used on the same card model, so was unsure.

I think one of the issues I was having is that I didnt realise this card needs to be manually set to the channel at the start..

eg. airmon-ng start wlan0 11

not being on the correct channel and I was wasting time collecting thousands of packets and no ARPs.

Im still a bit confused what the drivers ieee80211 and linux kernel are for and if I need them for backtrack 4 at all for anything.


Im d/ling BT4 pre-final at the moment ISO- will try that out on vm workstation.

[erhardm]

I realise the mon0 VAP is created, but viewed some tutorials with wlan0 being used on the same card model, so was unsure.

I think one of the issues I was having is that I didnt realise this card needs to be manually set to the channel at the start..

eg. airmon-ng start wlan0 11

not being on the correct channel and I was wasting time collecting thousands of packets and no ARPs.

I think that the new VAP created is driver or aircrack-ng suite related. I have an Edimax EW-7318USg and in BT3 I had to customise the iso to be able to inject with it and when I typed airmon-ng rausb0, the monitoring interface was still rausb0, now using BT4pF it's wlan0 and the monitoring interface is mon0.

You can also use airodump-ng with this command to set it on channels

airodump-ng -cXX mon0

This gives you more flexibility in switching channels because in the same command you'll also capture the packets, see the packets increasing and knowing when to stop aireplay-ng. Just keep in mind, when using aireplay specify wlan0 to inject(in your case, of course).

[imported_hatake_kakashi]

The creation of VAP used to be madwifi (for atheros chipset) related however with the introduction of mac80211 stack (which backtrack4 now has this version of kernel) all supported chipsets have the ability to create one or more interfaces. Kismet can also create a new interface as well.

As with backtrack3, well the driver at the time was rt73 which relies on ieee80211 stack and therefore are not able to create VAP like madwifi-ng and atheros was capable of doing. The current backtrack for that same dongle uses rt73usb and has far more dependencies as opposed to what rt73 used to have.