Alfa AWUS036H

[Nyght]

Flames from a Seraphim... that doesn't happen every day

Dell Inspiron 1564

Hardware incompatibility with the:

Alfa AWUS036H external usb wireless modem.

I have spent several months trying to find out if BT 5 will work with the aforementioned modem and these are some of the answers I got:

BT Forum- "Works out of the box"

Aircrack Forum- "The Alfa AWUS036H will NOT work with BT5r1"

Alfa Homepage- "The Alfa AWUS036H works with BT 2 and 3 ... no mention of 4 or 5 but the driver is compatible with the Linux kernel 2.6 and onwards supposedly"

Various Linux forums- "make your own driver from scratch"..."use kudzu (this one was deleted soon after the poster put it up?)"..."use the network manager"..."there should be an option in wicd"..."modify the blacklist"...and a number of other responses that were essentially guesses.

Months of research and posting until a senior forum mod told me to give up the ghost and switch to a "friendly" Linux distro and do the pen testing from there using BT's same suite of pen testing programs. I did that and the alfa works fine... not a qualitative statement just factual.

I am aware the situation that Linux distros have with modems but making headway with the situation on a forum that takes weeks to screen posts was frustrating to say the least.

If anyone knows how to enable an Alfa AWUS036H on a Dell Inspiron 1564 with the BT5 distro I would like to know. If it is not possible then you can add it to the hardware incompatibility list.

If you don't know for certain please do not guess...I have spent months on that wild goose chase already.

I appreciate all feedback... even the flames Z/Z

[prizzy]

I'm having the same problem. Driver is installed, it's showing it's on using dmesg |tail -20, but ifconfig doesn't see it.

[Snayler]

I'm having the same problem. Driver is installed, it's showing it's on using dmesg |tail -20, but ifconfig doesn't see it.

Running "ifconfig" solo will only show active interfaces. From my experience, you will always have to "bring a USB interface up" after connecting it. The command below will show you all the available interfaces in your system:

ifconfig -a

And to bring it up:

ifconfig <interface_alias> up

@OP: I never got any problems with my AWUS036H in BT5, except when using it to connect to the internet. If there really exists some hardware issue between your alfa and your laptop, maybe running BT5 inside a virtual machine would solve the problem.

[scottm99]

I've got an inspiron 1545, and run the AWUS036H on it. Works fine out of the box (i.e. does monitor mode & packet injection). This is on BT5r1 32-bit GNOME. Which flavor of BackTrack are you running?

[twocents]

Try this:

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forum...ad.php?t=45455

Worked for me.

I did post a script using this and adding some commands to increase to 1000mw txpower on the beginners section. In my experience, the old Alfa AWUS036H 500mw works like a charm out of the box but the 1000mw version is a bit of a b!tch to get going. g0tm1lk's solution fixed it for me.

[Nyght]

Thanks for trying but I have done the modprode and rf thing to death before on my laptop and netbooks with no results. At least I know a BT forum member didn't try scam me by recommending a modem that doesn't work... Alfa changed their modem without changing the model designation. I'll think twice before I deal with Alfa again. Z/Z