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Thread: Qualcomm QCA61x4A Not Working on Monitor Mode

  1. #1
    Join Date
    2019-May
    Posts
    2

    Qualcomm QCA61x4A Not Working on Monitor Mode

    Hi there! Good afternoon!


    I am having trouble making monitor mode work with my wireless card, and was wondering if someone would give me a hand.


    It is a Kali recently installed as a second boot on my notebook (not a virtual machine), and the wireless card on managed mode is working correctly.


    I am able to set monitor mode with airmon-ng, after performing the check kill, but airodump-ng seems to capture nothing at all:




    Code:
    airmon-ng check kill
    airmon-ng start wlan0
    
    
    
    
    PHY    Interface    Driver        Chipset
    
    
    
    
    phy0    wlan0        ath10k_pci    Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
    
    
    
    
            (mac80211 monitor mode vif enabled for [phy0]wlan0 on [phy0]wlan0mon)
            (mac80211 station mode vif disabled for [phy0]wlan0)
    
    
    airmon-ng start wlan0
    
    
     CH  1 ][ Elapsed: 30 s ][ 2019-05-16 16:10                                         
                                                                                                    
     BSSID              PWR  Beacons    #Data, #/s  CH  MB   ENC  CIPHER AUTH ESSID
                                                                                                    
                                                                                                    
     BSSID              STATION            PWR   Rate    Lost    Frames  Probe



    As shown above, nothing comes up, and I am sure there are tons of wireless APs close by.


    My problems are very similar to this post (https://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?42540-ath10k-failed-to-load-pre-cal-pci), but seems no solution was found there. Hopefully I will be luckier with this thread


    Already updated my Kali using apt-get update + apt-get dist-upgrade.


    I tried following the troubleshooting guide (https://docs.kali.org/installation/troubleshooting-wireless-driver-issues), so I will try to describe my problem following the steps listed there:



    • Is it a wireless card?


    • ​Yup. Windows says it is a "Qualcomm QCA61x4A 802.11ac Wireless Adapter", and I was able to connect to my AP and navigate using it using Kali when in managed mode;




    • Is the device plugged in?


    • It is, and it is inside the notebook, not a USB wifi card. I can use it in managed mode normally;




    • show up on lsusb or lspci?


    • Yes, it is the last line on lspci:



    Code:
    00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 07)
    00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Skylake PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 07)
    00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 630 (Mobile)
    00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 07)
    00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Skylake Gaussian Mixture Model
    00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Thermal Controller (rev 10)
    00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller (rev 10)
    00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM (rev 10)
    00:15.0 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller (rev 10)
    00:15.1 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller (rev 10)
    00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller (rev 10)
    00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 10)
    00:1b.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port (rev f0)
    00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port (rev f0)
    00:1d.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH PCI Express Root Port (rev f0)
    00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device a30d (rev 10)
    00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)
    00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller (rev 10)
    00:1f.5 Serial bus controller [0c80]: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller (rev 10)
    01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106M [GeForce GTX 1060] (rev a1)
    3b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2400 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
    3c:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)




    • Does dmesg contain any information about the driver loading and/or failing


    • It does. In fact, seems to me it is the same problem reported here;



    Code:
    dmesg | grep ath10k | grep failed
    
    
    
    
    [   18.646524] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/pre-cal-pci-0000:3c:00.0.bin (-2)
    [   18.646867] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/cal-pci-0000:3c:00.0.bin (-2)

    Code:
    dmesg | grep ath10k
    
    
    
    
    [   17.919593] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
    [   17.922907] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: pci irq msi oper_irq_mode 2 irq_mode 0 reset_mode 0
    [   18.646524] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/pre-cal-pci-0000:3c:00.0.bin (-2)
    [   18.646867] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/cal-pci-0000:3c:00.0.bin (-2)
    [   18.796846] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-6.bin
    [   18.796863] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: qca6174 hw3.2 target 0x05030000 chip_id 0x00340aff sub 1028:0310
    [   18.796867] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: kconfig debug 0 debugfs 0 tracing 0 dfs 0 testmode 0
    [   18.798505] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware ver RM.4.4.1.c2-00057-QCARMSWP-1 api 6 features wowlan,ignore-otp,no-4addr-pad,raw-mode crc32 e061250a
    [   18.940010] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin
    [   18.940811] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: board_file api 2 bmi_id N/A crc32 20d869c3
    [   19.526002] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: Unknown eventid: 118809
    [   19.528900] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: htt-ver 3.56 wmi-op 4 htt-op 3 cal otp max-sta 32 raw 0 hwcrypto 1
    [   29.254103] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: Unknown eventid: 118809
    [   30.114336] ath10k_pci 0000:3c:00.0: Unknown eventid: 118809


    • Is Kali a VM?


    • Nope. Second boot on my notebook;




    • If there is nothing in dmesg and it?s not in a VM, then you might want to try the latest compat-wireless (...)


    • ​Well, there is something in dmesg, but I am starting to think the problem is around finding the proper firmware indeed.


    • However, the "compat-wireless" link (https://aircrack-ng.blogspot.com/2012/03/compat-wireless.html) at the end of the tutorial points to a page that indicates I should get the drivers here (https://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download), which is not a working link ("ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED").





    I am kind of lost. I am assuming I have to find out how to update my wireless driver, but having trouble finding out how, and I am not sure this is really the problem.


    Can anyone kindly point me to the right direction in order to solve this?


    Thanks a bunch for any help anyone can provide!

    PS: Had to place all links as pure text because otherwise chromes blocks the post with a XSS-Inspector thingie.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    2016-Dec
    Posts
    806
    That QCA6xxx series is crappy hardware/firmware. It is a known issue and there isn't anything we can do about it. If you can replace it with something else, go for it.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    2019-May
    Posts
    2
    Oh, good to know!

    I won't lose more time on it and just buy a usb wireless card then.

    Thanks!

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