So after installing the Armbian distro with hope that I can get monitor mode enabled on the built-in wireless card, it doesn't seem to be working.

 

Both the aircrack-ng software or iw cannot seem to put the driver into monitor mode even though it shows as being a supported mode:

 

mlinton@tinkerboard:~$ iw phy0 info
Wiphy phy0
	max # scan SSIDs: 9
	max scan IEs length: 2304 bytes
	Retry short limit: 7
	Retry long limit: 4
	Coverage class: 0 (up to 0m)
	Supported Ciphers:
		* WEP40 (00-0f-ac:1)
		* WEP104 (00-0f-ac:5)
		* TKIP (00-0f-ac:2)
		* CCMP (00-0f-ac:4)
		* CMAC (00-0f-ac:6)
	Available Antennas: TX 0 RX 0
	Supported interface modes:
		 * IBSS
		 * managed
		 * AP
		 * monitor

Anyone had luck putting the driver into monitor mode?

Monitor mode is considered as extended function and usually, on those low-cost chip/driver, found on those boards, does not work out of the box. Perhaps some patching is needed but this is out of our mission zone - when wireless works (decently) as a station and AP mode, our job is done. In some cases, even getting here requires an insane amount of time. We are Linux for development boards, not a WiFi for Linux development boards project  ... but this field is quite well supported in Armbian. We tend to include as much 3rd party USB/mPCI WiFi drivers+firmware out of the box. If you want to use monitor mode, get 8811/8812/8814 based USB adaptor. Monitor mode works out of the box on all modern kernel 4.x+

Hey Igor, 

 

I totally get it - just thought that someone might have/heard of a better driver for the r8723bs chip.  I saw that there were several projects geared at a proper driver for the chip like https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs and there is a great deal of hackability for this board if I can get the wifi/BT chip to play nice with some of the security software I use.

 

Cheers.

 

7 hours ago, jthunder said:

I saw that there were several projects geared at a proper driver for the chip like https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs

That is the driver that made it into mainline (4.12+).  The legacy kernel is a different driver.