Alfa Awus036h - and Wireshark promiscuous problem

[MoonDoggie]

Hello Backtrackers,
I've been using Ubuntu (Feisty) for a couple of years and have been doing basically what this distro is all about, pen testing. I'm really enjoying Backtrack but am having a couple of problems and have literally been trying to figure them out for about a week now, with my last resort going to these forums before I reinstall Ubuntu.

Specs: Dell Inspirion 6400 Notebook with Intel Wireless (iwlcore/iwl3945) card.
USB Wireless: Alfa awus036h
Running on HD install

Some questions:
1. My Alfa Awus036H card comes up in BT4F as driver rt2870sta. From everything I've read about people getting this card working properly, everyone is using the rtl8187 drivers, and I've compiled them without error multiple times and blacklisted the other drivers and loaded the rtl8187s and can't get my interface to show up on iwconfig. (Do I need to add my dev id to a header file or something somewhere?)

2. Tab autocompletion is better on ubuntu out of the box. For instance when modprobe-ing drivers tab will list the currently installed drivers on the machine, with BT4 I have to know the driver name verbatim. I'm sure there's a configuration for this but I can't find it. Any pointers?

3. Wireshark absolutely will not show me anything but Broadcast / Beacon traffic, non-originating from my machine. I've read the FAQ for wireshark many times. Promiscuous mode is on. I have no problems doing this in Ubuntu (with a different laptop), so I know how it works. I can't narrow it down if it's the card or the drivers.

Many thanks for taking the time to read my wall of text and helping me fix my problem or pointing me in the right direction!

-Moon

[halfdone]

BT4 detected my alfa awus036h correctly, you might have alfa awus036NH

you internal wifi card works also well, it supports injection and monitor mode

3. Have you used airmon-ng to put your card to monitor mode?

[MoonDoggie]

Halfdone,
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I really appreciate it. Sometime around noon today after working through the awus036h card, I finally decided to flip it over and check the S/N and revision number when I realized that I had an awus050nh card... (Just as you suspected), which uses the rt2800usb drivers, which work just fine except with everything but WICD (can't figure this out yet, still working on it).

There is a small problem though. Once I installed the patched new rt2800usb drivers I lost my network on startup. I can get it to work by modprobe -r iwl3945 iwlcore rt2800usb....etc.
reloading them and ifconfig wlan0 up (my intel wireless card). But it's pretty tedious to do so much,
I know I could create an alias to them, but is there another way? (My suspect is "start-network" that maybe I can edit).

Thanks again
Moon

[roybatty]

In order to capture traffic other than yours with wireshark you need to set your card in promiscuous mode (different from monitor mode). However, your wireless card driver should have been compiled with specific support for promiscuous mode in advance (Not all cards support it, and not all drivers are compiled that way by devs).