March 20, 2006

Running BackTrack on Thinkpad z60t: Wireless

Greetings fellas,

Have been playing with linux on my new Thinkpad z60t recently. Tried running BackTrack (a live-cd distribution of remote-exploit group) from usb drive. BackTrack is based on slax and is probably the best live cd distribution around for pen-testing with lots of security and forensic tools onboard.

Well, it booted up fine from the usb stick, but the default madwifi drivers on the latest (v.3.0) backtrack were not able to recognize the wireless card (ThinkPad 11a/b/g mini-pci) on my laptop which is based on Atheros chipset. After some googling I found out that latest madiwifi drivers should work just fine. Tried looking for some compiled module for slax but could not find any. So, finally decided to build one myself.

I followed the steps here to compile the modules and it went on quite smooth. My wireless card worked just fine with the latest madwifi drivers. To make life a little easier for other BackTrack and Slax users, I have uploaded this module to Slax module repository and my googlepages web space.

Here are the links to the modules:

slax.linux-live.org:
http://slax.linux-live.org/modules.php?id=870

googlepages.com:
http://manugarg.googlepages.com/madwifi-ng-i386-20060319.tgz
http://manugarg.googlepages.com/madwifi-ng-i386-20060319.mo

To use these modules, either use MySlax Creator to modify the iso image or if you are using usb stick, you can directly copy the module to the 'modules' directory on your usb stick.

After booting up backtrack, you will be able to see ath0 device automatically(if not then try running modprobe ath_pci).

To bring up interface:
ifconfig ath0 up
To configure wep key:
iwconfig ath0 key
To get an ip address:
dhcpcd ath0

Hope this helps,
Manu Garg
http://www.manugarg.com
"Journey is the destination of life"

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