wavemon not monitoring USB 5GHz wifi about wavemon HOT 14 CLOSED

It is important to know where the problem is coming from. Suggestions for trouble-shooting:

• can the interface be attached to an access point (e.g. iwconfig ra0 <essid>), or
• does iwlist ra0 scan or iw dev ra0 scan produce any results?

If the answer to either question is 'no', it could be a driver or firmware problem.

According to this debian page, the driver appears to be rt2800usb. Do you have the firmware installed for this one? If it is a firmware issue, usually there is an error message in /var/log/dmesg or /var/log/kern.log that indicates that the module is missing the binary firmware.

from wavemon.

Thank you for your help.

can the interface be attached to an access point (e.g. iwconfig ra0 )

Yes, i can attach to an access point

ra0       Ralink STA  ESSID:"hymiehome5"  Nickname:"RT2870STA"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=5.785 GHz  Access Point: A4:2B:8C:19:34:EA   
          Bit Rate=24 Mb/s   
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Link Quality=83/100  Signal level:-79 dBm  Noise level:-107 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

does iwlist ra0 scan or iw dev ra0 scan produce any results?

Yes

 ra0       Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:1F:90:DC:CB:34
                    Protocol:802.11b/g
                    ESSID:"ZF2L4"
                    Mode:Managed
                    Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
                    Quality=13/100  Signal level=-85 dBm  Noise level=-80 dBm
                    Encryption key:on
                    Bit Rates:54 Mb/s

According to this debian page, the driver appears to be rt2800usb. Do you have the firmware installed for this one?

I read somewhere, I can't remember where, that the rt3573sta driver was better than rt2800usb, so that is what I am using. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "firmware" . When I think of "firmware", I think of the internal software running on the device itself, such as a router. This USB adapter does not, as far as I know, have firmware, just a kernel module, which is installed and working.

from wavemon.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original question. My wifi is working successfully. wavemon does see this:

├─Levels───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                              │
│                              NO INTERFACE DATA                               │
│                                                                              │
├─Statistics───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│RX: n/a                                                                       │
│TX: n/a                                                                       |
├─Info─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│mode: Unspecified                                                             │
│frequency/channel: n/a                                                        │
│                                                                              │
│station flags: (none), preamble: short, slot: long                            │
│power mgt: n/a                                                                │
│retry: n/a,  rts/cts: off,  frag: off                                         │
│encryption: 479F-XXXX-ECFA-XXXX..XX-3119 (128 bits), open [1] (2 other keys)  │
├─Network──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ra0 (UP RUNNING BROADCAST MULTICAST)                                          │
│mac: EC:1A:59:39:D4:4E, qlen: 1000                                            │
│ip: 192.168.42.153/24                                                         │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

There is some data in wavemon. Just not all of it. No "levels", no "statistics", only a little bit of "info".

from wavemon.

I tried the rt2800usb module and did not get very far.

newlaptop-pts/2:~% sudo /sbin/ifconfig wlan4 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: No such file or directory
newlaptop-pts/2:~% sudo /sbin/iwlist wlan4 scanning 
wlan4     Interface doesn't support scanning : Network is down
newlaptop-pts/2:~% sudo /usr/sbin/iw wlan4 scan
command failed: Network is down (-100)

I can command it to look for a specific essid, but I can't figure out how to get it to use my WPA password.

from wavemon.

OK, so now I understand what you meant by firmware. I found the firmware and installed it. And now I have two scenarios.

With the rt2800usb driver, I can get standard 2.4GHz wifi and wavemon, but not 5GHz wifi

With the rt3573sta driver, I can get 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi, but not wavemon

Of course, I'd rather have 5GHz wifi and wavemon, and I'm still not sure why wavemon won't read the rt3573sta device.

from wavemon.

Thank you for the detailed comments, it helps a lot in clarifying.
From the output I see you are using the newer variant of wavemon, which is based on nl80211. This is a newer API, which is also used by the iw command. The old API was called 'wireless extensions' (wext) -- this is what iwlist and iwconfig use.

I have not used wavemon with this particular usb device yet, so this could be either a wavemon bug, a driver issue, or a nl80211 issue. To find out, could you please help with the following:

• if the 'scan' functionality (scan screen, F3 or 's' keyboard shortcut) works, it confirms nl80211 operation,
• can you check against iw (apt-get install iw) to see if this is coming from iw:
  • iw dev ra0 link shows the packet counters/signal (the rx/tx in the above screenshot),
  • iw dev ra0 station dump should show the station information

If iw produces results while wavemon does not, it is clearly a wavemon bug. Thank you for all the information.

from wavemon.

When I use the rt3573sta module and the ra0 device, neither wavemon scanning nor iw works. Both scanning and iw work with the rt2800usb module and the wlan4 device.

So that is my problem -- the module rt3573sta does not conform to the newer nl80211 system. How can I get the older wext wavemon?

from wavemon.

You can either do this in git directly, by checking out v0.7.6 (git tag previous release), or you can download the corresponding source.

Thank you for the heads-up, I will look into the driver issue rt3573 after work today.

from wavemon.

I'm using external wifi adapter ALFA AWUS036AC. I am able to select it on the prefs-tab in wavemon, but on the scan-tab I see only Scan trigger failed on enx00c0ca953ae9: No such device
and on the info-tab:

My laptops network card works in wavemon as expected, but external doesn't.

lsusb gives next:

from wavemon.

Try the above instructions,

• does it work with iw (see above)
• does it work with iwconfig?

Something like

sh>iwlist enx00c0ca953ae9 scan
sh> iw dev enx00c0ca953ae9 scan

You can also related commands to see if the device responds,

sh>iw dev enx00c0ca953ae9 link
sh>iw dev enx00c0ca953ae9 station dump

from wavemon.

Hello, I am following up on using the Alfa AWUS036ACH, it looks like iw is just not seeing it.

$ sudo iw dev enX00c0caXXXX link
Not connected.

iwlist xxx scan works fine, but iw dev xxx scan errors out with "No such device", it just doesn't see it.

from wavemon.

@Voltrage - this seems to be a driver problem, it works with the older interface (wireless extensions, iwlist), but not the new one (iw).
This has happened for a couple of drivers in the past.

It seems the device is based on RTL8812AU. There is a driver project for this here: https://github.com/diederikdehaas/rtl8812AU
It has been forked quite a bit, here are some instructions for ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/573737/alfa-awus036ac-usb-wifi-adapter

from wavemon.

@Voltrage - any updates on your driver situation? Given that this issue is nearly 3 years old, I would like to wrap this up into a 'known driver problems' section.

from wavemon.

No activity for a year, unclear if those driver issues persist.

Closing issue.

from wavemon.