So I had a few issues getting wireless on Backtrack to connect properly. It was a little bit of a bummer as I have a dedicated netbook for BackTrack. Previously I didn’t really care too much cause the only time i really wanted to use the wireless was in promiscuous mode for playing around with WEP/WPA AP’s. But I finally decided that I wanted to use it for a little more than just that, it would actually be cool if I could do some stuff on that machine on my wireless network without being stuck on the other end of a long blue cable. After much stuffing about I finally got it working (although I have a tonne of studying to do .. which im kind of not doing) .. this is far from a perect solution (in fact, its a bit of a hack) and im not too convinced in with keeping my method (you’ll see why soon). Anyway .. lets move on shall we

So first of all you need to get onto the internet via a cabled connection, I will assume you know how to do this and have gotten it going (if not .. google is your friend). You need to install a few things .. you can install all these through “apt-get” commands, and they may even already be installed.

You want to install wicd & the wpasupplicant

Next, I went and edited my /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file to look similar to the following (edit your own SSID and PSK)


ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=netdev
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
eapol_version=1
network={
ssid="AP NAME"
psk=0123456789abcdef # or psk="your password"
priority=5
}


Theoretically, I should have then been able to add the following to my /etc/network/interfaces file, reboot, and had wireless.

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inte dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Unfortunately it didn’t work though

So my final backup plan was to do the following

chmod 0600 /etc/network/interface

So it isn’t exposed to the world, then edit the /etc/network/interface file with the following

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inte dhcp
wpa-ssid ap_name
wpa-psk wpa_passphrase

I then did an

ifup wlan0

and away I went.

I guess I don’t really feel comfortable in leaving my passphrase in the network interface like that .. but I guess no matter where it is it’s pretty much out in the open in plain text anyway .. at least this way I have the file locked down (a bit)

I hope this helps out anyone having issues with their wireless on BackTrack. It can be used on other flavours of linux as well .. but I did it specifically for BT.