Huge thanks to our Platinum Members Endace and LiveAction,
and our Silver Member Veeam, for supporting the Wireshark Foundation and project.

Wireshark-users: [Wireshark-users] Recommendations for a USB Wi-Fi adapter for testing monitor-mo

Date Prev · Date Next · Thread Prev · Thread Next
From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 17:36:33 -0700
I have a collection of VMware Fusion virtual machines that I use for libpcap/WinPcap development.

Until recently, I was able to test monitor-mode support by plugging in a Belkin Wireless G adapter (with a Zydas chip) into my Mac and telling Fusion to connect it to the virtual machine.

That no longer works with VMware Fusion 8.1.1 on OS X El Capitan - my Linux virtual machines, for example, get USB errors trying to upload the firmware, and the Windows virtual machine has no better luck even with the vendor driver.  I don't know whether 1) the upgrade to El Capitan, 2) the upgrade to Fusion 8, or 3) upgrades to the guest OSes are the problem here.

The adapter is also a bit behind the times, as it only does 11g, not 11m or 11ac.

Does anybody know of a VMware Fusion issue here, and, if so, do they know a way to work around it?

If not, does anybody have any recommendations for a USB Wi-Fi adapter that:

	1) has driver support on reasonably recent Linux kernels, {Free,Net,Open}BSD, and Windows, preferably with monitor-mode support on Linux (preferably with a mac80211 driver) and *BSD;

	2) preferably supports at least 802.11n?

(I'd ask for adapters known to work with Fusion, but I suspect 99 44/100% of the people here would be using the adapters on real machines rather than Fusion virtual machines.)