Alfa AWUS036ACH issues

[totally-lost]

I'm having difficulty getting this USB WiFi adapter to work under the latest version of Kali (2018.2) on my Lenovo X1 Carbon 2nd Gen.

Background: Completely fresh install of Kali. NOT a VM. The built in wireless card (i.e. not the USB adapter) was detected and successfully connected to my home WiFi during installation. Once the installation was complete I ran



apt update
apt install realtek-rtl88xxau-dkms

The install was apparently successful with no error messages. At this point, I was expecting my USB adapter to show up as wlan1 or some such under iwconfig. Instead, I don't see it at all. Output from everything I can think of below. Any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

iwconfig output


usb0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"xxxx"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.452 GHz Access Point: xx:23:B2:xx:6B:EA
Bit Rate=144.4 Mb/s Tx-Power=22 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:on
Link Quality=69/70 Signal level=-41 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:8 Invalid misc:191 Missed beacon:0

eth0 no wireless extensions.



ifconfig output


eth0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
ether 54:ee:75:3d:f9:6f txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 0 bytes 0 (0.0 B)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
device interrupt 20 memory 0xf0500000-f0520000

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 65536
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10<host>
loop txqueuelen 1000 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 20 bytes 1116 (1.0 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 20 bytes 1116 (1.0 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0

wlan0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255
inet6 fe80::5ec5:d4ff:fe02:5341 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 5c:c5:d4:02:53:41 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 70284 bytes 69846249 (66.6 MiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 38608 bytes 5812919 (5.5 MiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0



dmesg output after booting


[ 2.048049] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-pci
[ 2.052067] usb 2-2: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 2.200992] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8812
[ 2.200997] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 2.201000] usb 2-2: Product: 802.11n NIC
[ 2.201002] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 2.201005] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: 123456
[ 2.204424] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=8087, idProduct=8000
[ 2.204431] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
[ 2.204867] hub 1-1:1.0: USB hub found
[ 2.205043] hub 1-1:1.0: 8 ports detected
[ 2.275745] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5674], y [..4684]

[Mister_X]

If you plugged the device before installing the driver, you want to unplug it and plug it back. Reboot may help too.

If it still doesn't seem the device afterward, it is really weird because the vendor/product ID have been in the driver for a long time.

[totally-lost]

If you plugged the device before installing the driver, you want to unplug it and plug it back. Reboot may help too.

If it still doesn't seem the device afterward, it is really weird because the vendor/product ID have been in the driver for a long time.

Thanks for the reply. That doesn't seem to work.

dmesg | tail output below


[ 1500.795928] rfkill: input handler disabled
[ 1585.967360] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 2
[ 1597.001046] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 9 using xhci_hcd
[ 1597.149442] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8812
[ 1597.149448] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1597.149452] usb 1-2: Product: 802.11n NIC
[ 1597.149455] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 1597.149459] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 123456


Things I have tried:

Fresh install of Kali with wifi adapter plugged in.
Update drivers as mentioned previously.
Reboot machine.
Unplug and re-plug the adapter.
All of the above but installing Kali without the USB adapter plugged in.

Any other suggestions would be great. Am I correct in assuming that having 2 wireless adapters should be fine i.e. the one inside the laptop plus the USB adapter?

[totally-lost]

Update: Fixed the issue. I ran the following commands:


apt update
apt upgrade

Then installed all of the pending updates totalling over 1GB. I then had to reboot my machine. After that the adapter showed up as "USB WiFi".

I was originally using a metered connection so couldn't run the upgrade due to the large amount of data required. If you have the same issue I advise installing all updates first (even though it's supposed to work "out of the box").

[Mister_X]

always do dist-upgrade, not just upgrade.