Recovering an unreachable Pineapple

[UniversityStudent]

Quite a journey for to finish a lesson.

After attempting to configure an Open and WPA SSID I encountered an issue that I could no longer connect to the Management SSID.  After several hours of troubleshooting and trying to find a way to gain access to the router again I was stumped.  The instructions for the Firmware Recovery procedure talks about connecting to the Pineapple when it's booted into Recovery Mode, but the instructions do not specify what SSID to connect to in order to establish the Association. I bought a USB to Ethernet dongle thinking I would be able to go point-to-point between my laptop and the Pineapple, but that didn't work either. I ran Wireshark on that point-to-point connection and saw that the Pineapple was Broadcasting DHCP Discover messages, so I connected it to my home router so that it could pull an address.  Once it had an address, I finally gained access to the Pineapple again with http://<Production-IP>:1471.  I found the Pineapple wouldn't accept the root password that I'd configured originally, so I tried the password recovery password which did work. I assume it was stuck in that mode after all that troubleshooting.  Once I got into the Pineapple I went ahead and re-installed the firmware again hoping that would clear whatever issue I'd ran into that caused the problem in the first place.

After a reboot, I was able to connect back to the AP via Wi-Fi with the factory SSID and complete the setup process.  I noticed that I was still not seeing all of the options when going through the setup and some parts of the process were not working at all. 

After the setup was "completed", I still was not seeing the newly configured Management SSID nor the Open SSID that I had configured during setup. I manually rebooted it and found it was in the same stuck condition I was in before re-installing the firmware.  Again, I logged in through the Production interface and found the AP was back in the default fresh setup mode again, but it wasn't broadcasting the factory SSID anymore.  I ran through the setup a couple of more times with the same configurations and ran into the same issue.

After a few tries, I set the Management SSID to broadcast its ID and set the Open AP to a short name and enable broadcast for that one as well.  I finally saw those SSID's broadcasting in my list of available networks and was able to associate with the Management SSID to log into the Pineapple with the root credentials that I had configured.

I finished the assignment and was going through to clean-up my config and hide/disable the Open and WPA APs.  When I clicked save on the Open AP, I was kicked off of the Management SSID, so I lost connection. I was able to Re-Associate to get back into the AP. When I did the same on the Management SSID I was kicked off again, but I was NOT able to Re-Associate with the AP again.  Once again, I logged back into the AP through the Production IP and went to the device settings to see what I could find there.  The Management SSID was still configured and everything looked okay there, but I did not see it in the available SSID list on my laptop and was not able to connect to it manually by name.  

Finally, I disabled the Management SSID, saved, re-enabled it, and saved again.  I was then able to Associate to the Management SSID and connect to the Pineapple's management port.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but it was definitely stressful (trying to complete a school assignment) and not in the instructions.  

[Irukandji]

Please follow this.

https://docs.hak5.org/wifi-pineapple/faq/factory-reset-and-recovery

[UniversityStudent]

I did use that link when I was troubleshooting.  The piece of information that I didn't get from that is what SSID I need to connect to while in Recovery Mode. Unless I'm missing something, I wouldn't be able to access the AP by IP address if my laptop isn't associated to it.

[dark_pyrro]

5 hours ago, UniversityStudent said:

The piece of information that I didn't get from that is what SSID I need to connect to while in Recovery Mode

Not sure what you define as "Recovery Mode" in this case, but if it is about uploading the recovery firmware (with the LED showing red after pushing and releasing the hardware button of the Pineapple at boot), it shouldn't be possible to reach any AP as the boot loader doesn't have support for that. You need to connect to the Pineapple using the USB-C port (Ethernet) in that stage of the process.

However, if you mean the AP that should show in the next step when the stager/recovery firmware has been loaded (in the format of "Pineapple_XXXX"), then it's possible and that is documented.

https://docs.hak5.org/wifi-pineapple/setup/connecting-to-the-wifi-pineapple-over-wifi#pineapple_xxxx-setup-networks

[UniversityStudent]

Yes, I am talking about when the LED is solid red.

That was the part I was missing! I thought the USB-C port was just for power and the USB-A port was for an Ethernet dongle.  I dug out a power/Ethernet to USB-C adapter and was able to get link lights on the Ethernet connection which I couldn't get on the USB-A port with the red LED.  I didn't go further with trying to load the recovery image but assume that it would be a simple process now that there is network connectivity.  Thanks for the reply to clear up the point about connecting through the USB-C port.  Did I miss that part in the instructions somewhere?

[dark_pyrro]

I don't know how explicit the instructions need to be, but reading the docs and looking at the video makes it kinda obvious, at least to me.