Cannot bring up wifi interfaces on Kali Linux

Question

I'm running Kali-Rolling (2016.1) on a VMWare Workstation. Installed compat-wireless-2.6, and now it also displays wlan0 (card) & wlan1 (USB) as managed, but I can't find the way to make WiFi to work.

ip link show wlan0

wlan0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN mode
DORMANT group default qlen 1000

After ifconfig wlan0 up state is still DOWN.

---

$ sudo ifconfig -a

hwsim0    Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 12-00-00-00-00-00-3A-32-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:28 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:28 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:1680 (1.6 KiB)  TX bytes:1680 (1.6 KiB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 02:00:00:00:00:00  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wlan1     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 02:00:00:00:01:00  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

Solution

I don't think those are the interfaces you think these are.

Presence of hwsim0 indicates you have a mac80211_hwsim module loaded. WLAN0 and WLAN1 use MAC addresses (00:02:00:nn:mm:00) that are specific to mac80211_hwsim module, too.

My guess is that you have loaded virtual wifi module, that created those two interfaces. These do not work the way you think, sadly.

You may need to probe other modules to get your wlan cards to work.

Comments

[TCB13]

What happens fi you do iw wlan0 scan does it output any wireless networks?

[Animesh Anand]

Could you add the output of dmesg | grep wlan0?