BASIC SITUATION


  • My host system is Windows 10.
  • My AWUS1900 works in Windows 10. I can see (many) nearby wireless APs broadcasting their existence, and I can connect to those I manage. The wifi unit works.
  • In VirtualBox I am running Kali. VirtualBox does capture the AWUS1900. Kali does show a wlan0 adapter.
  • But within Kali I am not seeing any APs at all. Kali finds nothing for the wifi to connect to.


More specifically, when I followed the installation instructions at https://online-it.nu/how-to-install-...-linux-2018-4/ everything appeared to work up to the point where I launched airodump-ng wlan0 to sniff the network. Airodump-ng finds no networks. Similarly if I click the network icon at the top right of my Kali installation (I have the XFCE UI) I see "Wi-Fi Networks" followed by "disconnected" and no list of available networks. Running airmon-ng check kill made no difference to this behavior.

I've found a number of helpful pages around the web for getting Alfa USB units to work in a Kali VM, but none of the pages I found described this particular problem.

I am still relatively new to Linux. I could well be making beginner mistakes.



DETAILS

VirtualBox 6.0.10 r132072
This VM is configured for USB 3.0.

> lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Kali
Description: Kali GNU/Linux Rolling
Release: 2019.4
Codename: kali-rolling

> uname -a
Linux KaliVM 5.2.0-kali2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.2.9-2kali1 (2019-08-22) x86_64 GNU/Linux

> lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8813 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8814AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wireless Adapter
(and some others)

> iwconfig
eth0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=18 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff

> airmon-ng --verbose

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Kali
Description: Kali GNU/Linux Rolling
Release: 2019.4
Codename: kali-rolling

Linux KaliVM 5.2.0-kali2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.2.9-2kali1 (2019-08-22) x86_64 GNU/Linux
Detected VM using lspci
This appears to be a VirtualBox Virtual Machine
If your system supports VT-d, it may be possible to use PCI devices
If your system does not support VT-d, you can only use USB wifi cards

K indicates driver is from 5.2.0-kali2-amd64
V indicates driver comes directly from the vendor, almost certainly a bad thing
S indicates driver comes from the staging tree, these drivers are meant for reference not actual use, BEWARE
? indicates we do not know where the driver comes from... report this


X[PHY]Interface Driver[Stack]-FirmwareRev Chipset Extended Info

?[phy0]wlan0 88XXau[mac80211]-unavailable Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8814AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac mode managed