# Active Card & Monitor Mode

You might want to stop  the Network Manager 

```
systemctl stop NetworkManager
```

or disable the NetworkManager from autostart after reboot

```
systemctl disable NetworkManager
```

There is a possibility to limit Network manager devices but for Wifi hacking you kill all processes which interefers with Wifi.

{% content-ref url="../linux/network-manager" %}
[network-manager](https://hackerlab.gitbook.io/wiki.hackerlab.cz/linux/network-manager)
{% endcontent-ref %}

## Card Detected 

After reboot, your card is detected but not enabled at the moment. 

ifconfig does not list the device wlan0 

```
ifconfig
```

until you use (ifconfig -a) which lists also inactive cards.

```
ifconfig -a
```

iwconfig lists your wifi card all the time, regardless of it's active or inactive.

```
iwconfig

wlan0   IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any
        Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
        Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off 
        Encryption key:off 
        Power Management:off
```

We need to activate (enable) card for use.

## Enable Wifi Card

```
ifconfig wlan0 up
```

It might happen that your card is soft blocked by the kernel.

```
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill
```

Perform the following command and enable the network interface (wlan0) one more time.

```
rfkill unblock wifi

# try one more time
fconfig wlan0 up  
```

## airmon-ng - List available interfaces 

```
airmon-ng            

PHY     Interface       Driver          Chipset
phy0    wlan0           88XXau          Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8814AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
```

## Enable monitor mode

```
airmon-ng start wlan0 

Found 1 processes that could cause trouble.
Kill them using 'airmon-ng check kill' before putting
the card in monitor mode, they will interfere by changing channels
and sometimes putting the interface back in managed mode

    PID Name
    440 NetworkManager

PHY     Interface       Driver          Chipset

phy0    wlan0           88XXau          Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8814AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
                (monitor mode enabled)
```

You can see in my case the NetworkManager with PID 440 was detected as interference, kill or disable the process.

when you are in a monitor mode, the iwconfig command shows Mode:monitor

```bash
iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  Mode:Monitor  Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
```