Monitor Mode and Signal Strength

Hi.

I want to ask 2 questions about gli mini routers.

1- Do their wlan interfaces support monitor mode? (or promiscuous mode)

2- Is it possible to decrease or increase the signal strength of wlan interface?

 

Thank you…

  1. No idea what that is, so don’t know.

  2. Yes

The transmit power for the wireless is controlled by a slider in the Wireless Display Status screen in the GLi gui and in the Wireless devices detail screen in Luci. It is controlled by the Master entry.

On V2.25 (MIFI), and older versions as I recall the display for signal strength in the Wireless Status Display is set in the middle, however there is no line in the wireless file for “option txpower”. In Luci if one looks at the Transmit Power in Luci, it is set the Max for the regulatory agency. In my case 18dbm in the US. I assume this is set when one chooses the location\timezone during setup.

Moving the slider slightly to the right shows 12 and will add the line “option txpower ‘12’” to the wifi-device section. You are probably at max power if you make no changes to the default setting.

 

I have a AR300M and I think promiscuous mode is possible:

#turn it on

ifconfig wlan0 promisc

 

#lets see

ifconfig wlan0

wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr E4:95:6E:40:BE:16
inet6 addr: fe80::e695:6eff:fe40:be16%eth0/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING PROMISC MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:15 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:34 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1838 (1.7 KiB) TX bytes:10652 (10.4 KiB)
As you can see it reports “PROMISC”. But at the moment I don’t have any software on it to try it out and see if it actually works.

But as the driver reports it I would assume it does work.

Does not answer the question of what it is or does?

I was answering the original posting.

And should you be curious about things…Google can be a friend.

Yes it support monitor/Promiscuous mode flawlessly. This is one major features that we sell to business customers.

Thank you very much.

Have a nice day…

I am having trouble with this on my Mudi.

Earlier this week, I was able to put both wlan interfaces into monitor mode using the following commands:

ip link set wlan0 down
iw wlan0 set monitor none
ip link set wlan0 up

ip link set wlan1 down
iw wlan1 set monitor none
ip link set wlan1 up

I chose to put wlan0 back into managed mode and whilst it took many attempts, I managed it with the following commands:

ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed  
ifconfig wlan0 up

After re-booting the Mudi, BOTH wlan interfaces were in managed mode and now I am unable to put either interface into monitor mode.

Each time I execute to the command:

ip link set wlan1 up

or

ifconfig wlan0 up

the Mudi goes offline and it’s a few minutes before I can re-connect via the web portal shell.

I have the same issue if I connect directly to the Mudi via wifi.

For completeness:

My Mudi is connected via Ethernet and 4g, so still has internet access.
Using the Web Portal, I am able to run the BusyBox shell and perform commands

Of course, 10 minutes after posting my issues, I figured out a way

From the Admin interface, I installed the applications:

airmon-ng
pciutils

Then, run:

airmon-ng check

to see if there are any processes that might cause issues switching to monitor mode

airmon-ng check kill

to kill processes that might cause issues

airmon-ng start wlan0

to put interface into monitor mode

iw dev

to check the status of the wireless interfaces

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Thanks for posting a problem and solution.

This reminds me that the forum is 6 years old though.

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