Rosewill RNX-EasyN1 Wireless 2011-02-22
backtrack linux
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So, I like hacking because I like knowing what makes things tick. Hacking in the traditional sense provides this. And before you say anything, I’m one of the good guys. All I want to do is survey the network and make sure its as secure as I know how to make. Its also an awesome game of cops and robbers. And I love my netbook, partially because of its compact size but largely because it supports linux. Well, most of it. The one bug in this is the broadcom wireless adaptor that came with my netbook. It doesn’t support monitor mode or injection. Which is crucial to showing your neighbor why he should give you $20 to set up WPA2 on his network. So, I had to buy a “replacement”.

What I picked up is this, the Rosewill RNX-EasyN1, mostly because it was a tantalizing $10 shipped on newegg. And now I’m going to review it.

Appearance

I’ll be frank, its kinda of ugly. The thing is pretty chunky, and pretty ugly. The button is for WPS which means the adapter should communicate with the router and set everything up automatically. I’ve never used it.

Crappy pic is crappy

Give me a real camera and I'll retake the pics

What Matters, How Does it Work?

Windows

I tested the adapter briefly under Windows 7. It acquired the drivers with no issue, and Inssider was able to use it. Who cares about windows?

Linux!

Fedora

There’s some driver funkyness to be done to get it to work that I haven’t done. (Note, I did actually get this to work. You need the rt3070 drivers and it will mount as ra0). The broadcom adapter does fine so I don’t *need* this to work on fedora. What I wanted this device for was:

Backtrack 4 R2

And the important thing is, it works. For both injection and monitor mode. The adapter mounts as wlan0 and uses the ralink 2870/3070 driver (which is default).

Monitor Mode

Monitor mode was tested with two methods:

  1. airmon-ng start wlan0 which reports that there is now a mon0 created.
  2. iwconfig wlan0 mode Monitor. Running iwconfig again reports that the device is in monitor mode. It was confirmed by using Kismet and doing a little bit of war sitting.
Injection

Injection was tested with aireplay-ng -9 wlan0. It reports that injection is functioning.

I haven’t successfully cracked WEP yet, but I presume this is because I wasn’t generating any traffic on my network when I was trying to do the WEP crack.

In Closing

The device does what I wanted it for. That’s all I need.