[awus036neh]

Hi Cooper and a happy new year. Thanks for replying so fast - didn't expect that, so I haven't given much attention to the problem lately.

Since you're running Gentoo I'm assuming you know your way around compiling a kernel. Did you try "make firmware" as part of the building process?

Does anything show up in the logs when you try to use the adapter, particularly when you run into that massive delay?

Does your kernel have support for this adaptor built-in or as a module? In case of a module, was the module already loaded before you attached the adapter, or did you allow that to happing automagically/do so manually after insertion?

To edit your post, notice the "MultiQuote" and "Quote" buttons to the lower-left corner of your post? To the left of them there's a faint grey text with the remaining options, specifically "report", "edit" and "delete". It's not particularly obvious, but they're there.

Yes I've compiled the kernel countless times in the past on various Linux systems, but I usually just use `genkernel` nowadays. I'll give it a try at a manual compilation with `make firmware`, which I've never had the opportunity to try before.

The log is verbose, but nothing out of the ordinary AFAICT. I could post a complete log generated by the insertion of the device plus other related up/down operations.

I've build the module. I've tried pretty much all combination of inserting it before/after loading the module, with different timings, etc. I've literally spent a couple dozens of hours on the issue in the last months. (Although I've never tried building support in the kernel directly, so might try that.)

(As for the edit button, maybe there's something special with my account, but I can't see it; only the Report link.)

According to this post by m3t4tr0n (which I'm quite confident is the 'metatron' user that used to be active on this forum in a distant past) you might need a small patch.

All I can say is that the 'metatron' on this forum is a very knowledgeable chap with a particular knack for wifi-related things. If he says something works, that something works.

It's interesting, but I'll politely discard any solution that is that old; downgrading the kernel and applying manual patches sound a very good way to call for more problems.

What I find very disappointing is how Hak5 advertises the adapter to be working out of the box, while numerous users find themselves forced to manually patch an incredibly outdated kernel to make it work, sometimes, after days/weeks of troubleshooting. I've mailed them, but have received no clear explanation so far. They've been kind enough to provide me with a second unit to test with though, and that's very appreciated.

Thanks again for the info and I'll try to provide the above info soon enough.

[awus036neh]

For reference purposes, here is another topic on aircrack-ng.org that describes the exact same problem and also with no solution to it: http://forum.aircrack-ng.org/index.php?topic=308.0 (according to the board page, the topic has over 12k views and is locked, so no one can contribute anymore to it).

NB: Not sure how to edit my previous post. Had to double post.

[awus036neh]

Hi.

I just registered to report the same problem with my two identical Ralink units. I thought that reports of this problem around the web were lacking a bit of details, so I thought about buffing up the problem description for troubleshooting sake.

I've tried the units on three different systems -- an AMD desktop, an old EEEPC and a modern Asus UX303L laptop. The first two are running a native Gentoo up-to-date system. The Asus laptop runs two VMs, a Gentoo system (with VBox additions) and a Kali Linux (live CD version, not a full installation). On all systems, airodump-ng is able to scan through all channels, but there is no access point showing up at all (the antenna is fine btw).

These systems are all running a recent kernel version (3.1x.x). Could it be a problem with recent kernels?

I have tried 6 different versions of the firmware, found here and there on the web. Here are their checkums:

$ md5sum rt2870.bin*
ac4f6d8b679945208a978e397c016aa7  rt2870.bin
2bb89af3a7d446deb4695c9a3daa7f9d  rt2870.bin.1
36c944c3138125605d28c0a3a1338be9  rt2870.bin.2
4613706159f1b75b9e6c040c19e09388  rt2870.bin.3
ac4f6d8b679945208a978e397c016aa7  rt2870.bin.4
c8ecd4dad23c594966b3a56a86ecef46  rt2870.bin.5
bd024cacbce269c4b5429583566b7385  rt2870.bin.6
$ ls -l rt2870.bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Dec 22 17:15 rt2870.bin -> rt2870.bin.4

The lsusb output of my two Alfa AWUS036NEH devices is:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter

A rather unusual symptom is that starting the monitor mode takes several seconds, which is quite longer than other typical devices. I experience the same delay when setting the interface up/down with ifconfig.

$ time sudo ifconfig wlp0s6u2 down

real    0m2.314s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.030s
$ time sudo ifconfig wlp0s6u2 up

real    0m11.363s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.240s

NetworkManager is not running on any of the Gentoo systems, and I stopped it on Kali before using airmon-ng.

As a final word, I am frankly quite suprised why this device is considered one of the best supported adapter on Linux, given that many other people are not even able to see access points with it. I for one would really like to understand how to fix this particular issue. Please, someone. ;)