Dell Inspiron 1545

[Citruspers]

Wow, this thread kind of exploded. My issue with my wifi card is that Wicd says encryption is not enabled (I'll try starting the deamon, that should do it I guess)

About the drivers: doesn't it use the mac 8011 drivers? Or am I confusing everyone now (including myself)

Update:
Still stuck with connecting to my WPA2 network. after starting wicd through init.d and manualy starting wicd in the menu, it reports it requires encryption to be anabled to connect this network. Any pointers guys? Network card is the intel one specified in the first post.

[hatake_kakashi]

cjonbe: Its not an indicator, I'm saying when you check under wireless interfaces to see if there's new entries, check also dmesg along with /var/log/messages.

Citruspers: I'd try associating to the network manually.

[Citruspers]

Thanks for the tip Hatake!

But still...this is 2009. All the other distributions let you connect with wifi in one click, and backtrack makes you go through a whole list of commands to get it to work. I thought pentesting was all about speed?

[hatake_kakashi]

Originally Posted by Citruspers

Thanks for the tip Hatake!

But still...this is 2009. All the other distributions let you connect with wifi in one click, and backtrack makes you go through a whole list of commands to get it to work. I thought pentesting was all about speed?

Backtrack is a pentesting distro, not a noob friendly distro. Its meant to be built for speed and for those who use power tools, who mostly rely on CLI (as most of the tools bundled are CLI based) and who can then make custom scripts to do exactly what they want without having to redefine the GUI landscape in backtrack to achieve the same effect.

I don't want to comment like as if I'm some developer for backtrack, but it has always been like that, the stance were to make it as portable to security professionals.

[Snayler]

Originally Posted by Citruspers

My next challenge lies at getting wifi to work. The card is recognised and detects my wpa2 network, but says encryption is not enabled (same story with my Alfa awus036H).

Originally Posted by Citruspers

Wow, this thread kind of exploded. My issue with my wifi card is that Wicd says encryption is not enabled (I'll try starting the deamon, that should do it I guess)
(...)
Update:
Still stuck with connecting to my WPA2 network. after starting wicd through init.d and manualy starting wicd in the menu, it reports it requires encryption to be anabled to connect this network. Any pointers guys? Network card is the intel one specified in the first post.

Start wicd, open wicd, click on the little arrow after essid and click on advanced settings. There you can set you network encryption and key/password. Close, connect, enjoy.

[Citruspers]

Snailer, I've looked through the settings but did not find an encryption option, but I will look again, thanks.

Hatake: Built for speed, exactly. What's faster, typing half a book of terminal commands, or just clicking on the network you wish to join, and typing the password. I am perfectly capable of connecting through the command line, but then again, I am also perfectly capable of starting a fire by rubbing a 2 wooden sticks together. And still I use a lighter whenever I want to make a fire.

[hatake_kakashi]

Originally Posted by Citruspers

Hatake: Built for speed, exactly. What's faster, typing half a book of terminal commands, or just clicking on the network you wish to join, and typing the password. I am perfectly capable of connecting through the command line, but then again, I am also perfectly capable of starting a fire by rubbing a 2 wooden sticks together. And still I use a lighter whenever I want to make a fire.

And if you're stuck with no gui or if the gui doesn't work because there's some internal error but you can't verify that because you don't know how to use cli properly? would you then breakdown?

[Snayler]

Originally Posted by Citruspers

Snailer, I've looked through the settings but did not find an encryption option, but I will look again, thanks.

It's Snayler...

And it's not in the settings. Looks like i've made a mistake (my bad). So i'll be more specific. Open wicd and search for networks. You should see something like this:

 > APssid 100% WEP 00:11:22:33:44:55
 [Connect]

Click on the little arrow next to essid, and click on "advanced settings" button. There you can set your key.

[Citruspers]

Snayler: my apologies, and thank you.

Hatake: What if your screen fails? I presume you are also able to connect and hack wireless networks without a screen too?
Truth is, you completely missed my point. I heartily agree every serious pentester should know how to connect to a wireless network through the terminal, but I also think (and I'll say it again), the alternative should be simple. I don't want to spend a lot of time connecting if my objective is to do some metasploiting on a network. And I'm sure a client will value my timesaving skills doing so.

[hatake_kakashi]

Originally Posted by Citruspers

Hatake: What if your screen fails? I presume you are also able to connect and hack wireless networks without a screen too?
Truth is, you completely missed my point. I heartily agree every serious pentester should know how to connect to a wireless network through the terminal, but I also think (and I'll say it again), the alternative should be simple. I don't want to spend a lot of time connecting if my objective is to do some metasploiting on a network. And I'm sure a client will value my timesaving skills doing so.

Can YOU hack without a screen with or without a GUI? sounds more absurd than trying to hack with or without a GUI.

The alternative is if you can't use GUI, use CLI, when GUI dies you always have CLI that you can rely on. So lets say if knetworkmanager fails because of some x handling error, your next step is to cry? or would you give iwconfig + wpa_supplicant a try to see if its really a driver/card issue or its actually knetworkmanager issue? Or wait, you would try other GUI tools like wicd and pray?