Clients not probing/connecting to Karma in MK4 with FW 2.8.1

[steps]

Hey everybody!

Sadly, my first post in this forum will be a question, as I have a problem with Karma in MK4 (FW 2.8.1). But first of all: I really like the Pineapple, thanks for creating it :)

However, here's my problem, hopefully you guys can help me (maybe simply help me understand what went wrong):

As I understand it, enabling Karma will put the Pineapple in what I call "Jasager-Mode", i.e. responding to all probe requests with a "yes", thus tricking clients into connecting to it (if they have been connected to an open wifi network). I know that this won't work for secured wifi networks, but only for open ones. When I turn Karma on, I can see quite a lot of probes in the web-frontend's status window and from time to time some poor client even connects to my pineapple.

But of course I wanted to try something different and so I decided that it was about time I connected my phone. I asked a colleague of mine to tether my phone to his (using SSID 'example' and no security in Android) and then kill the AP. I then had an AP in my AP list that was (of course) not in range. I then waited for the SSID 'example' to show up in the list of incoming probe requests and for the phone (HTC One, running some custom ROM with Android 4.1.2) to be connected to the Pineapple. But nothing happened. Not a single probe was sent by the phone (or captured by the pineapple).

I then tried to change the Karma-SSID to 'example' and the phone found it immediately, connected to it and everything worked as expected.

I read somewhere that Android > 4.0.4 does not probe for wifi networks anymore - to test this, I wiped the dust off my old HTC Desire (Android 2.2) and tried the above once more (with the same result).

Long story short, here are my questions:

• Is Karma supposed to do what I think it should do?
• Is Android really not sending any probes?
• Why can/must I change the Karma-SSID? Shouldn't it do that automagically?
• What can I do to trick the Androids into connecting to my Pineapple?

I hope I could make my questions clear. Should you need any additional information, please feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance!

P.S: I tried searching for the solution (in this forum and beyond), but could not find anything useful (except maybe the Android 4.0.4 hint). Should I've missed the answer and thus created a redundant post, I apologize (and would appreciate a link).

Greetings from Germany - steps

[Foxtrot]

• Is Karma supposed to do what I think it should do?
• Is Android really not sending any probes?
• Why can/must I change the Karma-SSID? Shouldn't it do that automagically?
• What can I do to trick the Androids into connecting to my Pineapple?

1: Karma should automatically join devices that have previously connected and remembered to unsecured networks to the pineapple.

2: I seem to recall a bug with an Android version not working with probes, however I also think that Darren tested this and his worked.

3:Karma's SSID is hidden and has no name, so to speak. If Karma association was succesful, you would see the pineapple as "Free Wifi" etc..

4:Try creating a WiFi Profile on the phone, and make sure its auth is set to "Open", Then activate karma, cycle WiFi on the Android Device and it should connect.

Hope that helps and welcome to the forums :)

[steps]

1: Karma should automatically join devices that have previously connected and remembered to unsecured networks to the pineapple.

2: I seem to recall a bug with an Android version not working with probes, however I also think that Darren tested this and his worked.

3:Karma's SSID is hidden and has no name, so to speak. If Karma association was succesful, you would see the pineapple as "Free Wifi" etc..

4:Try creating a WiFi Profile on the phone, and make sure its auth is set to "Open", Then activate karma, cycle WiFi on the Android Device and it should connect.

Hope that helps and welcome to the forums :)

Hey Foxtrot,

thanks a lot for your reply! Let me get trough it step by step here...

1. OK, I was right about how Karma works, good to know :)

2. Hmm, I guess the more recent phones use passive scanning (i.e. waiting for a network's beacon frames) only, at least the ones I have available around here...

3. That makes a lot of sense, but...when I boot up my Pineapple, I immediately get a new WiFi network having the SSID that I put into the "Karma SSID"-field on the Configuration page. Is there any way of disabling this? And what is the sense of this field if the SSID is hidden? I could really use a bit of insight here...

4. That was what I tried over and over again: open an unsecured hotspot, e.g. via a second mobile phone, kill the hotspot and wait for Karma to fake it. That never happened with mobile phones, but I successfully lured a colleagues laptop into connecting to my Pineapple and just finished an nmap-scan of the host :)

So to make things short: the pineapple itself works like a charm, but not when using mobile phones. As I am not allowed to use wireshark in my company's network at the moment, I won't be able to verify the lack of probe requests made by the phone until next week, then I'll hopefully be able to give some more details on this issue. I'd appreciate if you could tell me more about the Karma-SSID-field on the Configuration page, as this keeps confusing me a bit (and I'd really love to disable it if possible).

Thanks a lot and greets - Steps

[Foxtrot]

The SSID you set for your pineapple is only visable when Karma is disconected, as a means of connecting to your pineapple wirelessly, while your phone may see this before and after you activate karma, that is only because yoru phone will temporarily keep it in its search list. New phones that scan will not see it.