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.