Time for action – configuring your wireless card

We will be using the wireless adapter with the penetration tester's laptop.

Follow these instructions step by step to set up your card:

1. Plug in the card to one of the Kali laptop's USB ports and boot it. Once you log in, open a console terminal and type in iwconfig. Your screen should look as follows:
   

   As you can see, wlan0 is the wireless interface created for the wireless adapter.

   Type in ifconfig wlan0 up to bring the interface up. Then, type in ifconfig wlan0 to see the current state of the interface:

   
2. The MAC address 00:c0:ca:3e:bd:93 should look like the MAC address written under your Alfa card. I am using the Edimax that gives me the preceding MAC address 80:1f:02:8f:34:d5. This is a quick check to ensure that you have enabled the correct interface.

What just happened?

Kali ships with all the required drivers for the Alfa and Edimax adapters out of the box. As soon as the machine booted, the adapter was recognized and was assigned the network interface wlan0. Now our wireless adapter is up and functional!