Pentesting my wifi

[FeMike]

A few years back I bought a Alfa awus036h USB WiFi adapter with the intent to learn how to pentest my wifi to use on old xp laptop. Fast forward to now I no longer have that machine but do have the Pinebook Pro. Upon plugging in the USB it freezes the p64 to the point it wont work unless I unplug the card and reboot machine. Anyone with experience with this type of stuff kindly share what they used and if it worked or if the same thing happened to them? I tried finding specs on power consumption for the card assuming it draws to much power but to no avail.

[shmoo]

A few years back I bought a Alfa awus036h USB WiFi adapter with the intent to learn how to pentest my wifi to use on old xp laptop. Fast forward to now I no longer have that machine but do have the Pinebook Pro. Upon plugging in the USB it freezes the p64 to the point it wont work unless I unplug the card and reboot machine. Anyone with experience with this type of stuff kindly share what they used and if it worked or if the same thing happened to them? I tried finding specs on power consumption for the card assuming it draws to much power but to no avail.

I currently have a Alfa Atheros AR9271 USB WiFi adapter, and it works great with both Manjaro and Kali on the PBP. Both identify it without issue when connected while running or on boot. I've only tested it from the "right side" USB port on the PBP, though. 

Adapter itself works great with various WiFi pentest tools such as Wireshark, Kismet, Wifite, Aircrack-NG, etc… from both Blackarch Repos (on Manjaro) or Kali.

[cartoonworld]

A few years back I bought a Alfa awus036h USB WiFi adapter with the intent to learn how to pentest my wifi to use on old xp laptop. Fast forward to now I no longer have that machine but do have the Pinebook Pro. Upon plugging in the USB it freezes the p64 to the point it wont work unless I unplug the card and reboot machine. Anyone with experience with this type of stuff kindly share what they used and if it worked or if the same thing happened to them? I tried finding specs on power consumption for the card assuming it draws to much power but to no avail.

I happen to have an ALFA 802.11b/g/n AWUS036NH (RALINK chipset) here.

Plugging the ALFA into the updated Official Pine64 Debian image results in the same behavior: The machine becomes unresponsive instantly, requiring a long press.

I decided to try with a Manjaro image on an sdcard. The RALINK adapter works properly on Manjaro.

I would say use Manjaro or another OS image, as that is where the most development will be found.

Happy Hacking

[FeMike]

A few years back I bought a Alfa awus036h USB WiFi adapter with the intent to learn how to pentest my wifi to use on old xp laptop. Fast forward to now I no longer have that machine but do have the Pinebook Pro. Upon plugging in the USB it freezes the p64 to the point it wont work unless I unplug the card and reboot machine. Anyone with experience with this type of stuff kindly share what they used and if it worked or if the same thing happened to them? I tried finding specs on power consumption for the card assuming it draws to much power but to no avail.

I currently have a Alfa Atheros AR9271 USB WiFi adapter, and it works great with both Manjaro and Kali on the PBP. Both identify it without issue when connected while running or on boot. I've only tested it from the "right side" USB port on the PBP, though. 

Adapter itself works great with various WiFi pentest tools such as Wireshark, Kismet, Wifite, Aircrack-NG, etc… from both Blackarch Repos (on Manjaro) or Kali.

Are either of the two distros on the Emmc or booted from SD? I'm interested in using Kali but never used an installer script as it's new to me. Did you have any issues using the Kali script? I'll try building it, do you have any pointers that would help a noob?

I tried the script reading the readme file but when I get to the last line and run the pinebook-pro.sh it returns with, please pass version number eg: ./pinebook-pro.sh 2.0 . When I type command that has 2.0 at the end it returns with missing cross compiler. set up PATH according to the readme. But there is nothing in the readme about setting up PATH.

[shmoo]

A few years back I bought a Alfa awus036h USB WiFi adapter with the intent to learn how to pentest my wifi to use on old xp laptop. Fast forward to now I no longer have that machine but do have the Pinebook Pro. Upon plugging in the USB it freezes the p64 to the point it wont work unless I unplug the card and reboot machine. Anyone with experience with this type of stuff kindly share what they used and if it worked or if the same thing happened to them? I tried finding specs on power consumption for the card assuming it draws to much power but to no avail.

I currently have a Alfa Atheros AR9271 USB WiFi adapter, and it works great with both Manjaro and Kali on the PBP. Both identify it without issue when connected while running or on boot. I've only tested it from the "right side" USB port on the PBP, though. 

Adapter itself works great with various WiFi pentest tools such as Wireshark, Kismet, Wifite, Aircrack-NG, etc… from both Blackarch Repos (on Manjaro) or Kali.

Are either of the two distros on the Emmc or booted from SD? I'm interested in using Kali but never used an installer script as it's new to me. Did you have any issues using the Kali script? I'll try building it, do you have any pointers that would help a noob?

I tried the script reading the readme file but when I get to the last line and run the pinebook-pro.sh it returns with, please pass version number eg: ./pinebook-pro.sh 2.0 . When I type command that has 2.0 at the end it returns with missing cross compiler. set up PATH according to the readme. But there is nothing in the readme about setting up PATH.

I am running both Manjaro and Kali from SD cards. 
Manjaro, I used the installer provided in the wiki.
I struggled a lot with getting a working bootable image for Kali built, but ended up documenting my process in another post in these forums. Others have been successful building a Kali image using other pre-existing Kali installations or even the stock Mate installation on the PBP, I believe. I took this awful round-about method involving VMs to get a working boot image. Now that it's done though, I just keep updated via the Kali repos. 

To be honest I rather prefer Manjaro with the Blackarch repos (linked in my earlier post) over Kali, for usability reasons. Kali has some great resources, to be sure… but the Blackarch repos have been impressive and Manjaro's frequent updates to support the PBP hardware have made it my default SD card loaded into the PBP.