I'm brand new to the field of pen testing, so please excuse my ignorance and the potential asking of a question that already exists. As I stated in the title, there are times when I run airodump-ng [interface]
and no networks are displayed. And to be clear, I do not mean that certain networks show up sometimes and not others; I mean that zero networks are displayed. I am using the Alfa AWUS036NEH network adapter with the Ralink RT2870/RT3070 chipset, and I know of three ways in which to switch this adapter to Monitor mode (excluding code to turn off wireless adapter and turn it back on):
iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor
airmon-ng start wlan0
airmon-ng check kill
followed byairmon-ng start wlan0
When I try to use any of these various methods, I get varied results. Sometimes the second approach will work and other times it won't. Same with the other methods.
My question, then, is whether this is normal or not. From what I have found online, the network adapter I am using is not one of the most popular ones, so I'm willing to buy a new one if that's the reason. But knowing that it might just be me not fully understanding how everything works, I was hoping to get some insight from this community.
For what it's worth, I'm using Airbase-ng 1.2 rc4 and running cat /etc/issue
shows Kali GNU/Linux Rolling \n \l
. Please let me know if more information is needed.
ifconfig wlan0 down; ifconfig wlan up
before doing any of this?ifconfig wlan0 down; ifconfig wlan0 up; ifconfig wlan0 down; iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor; ifconfig wlan0 up
?