Notes on WiFi not working after Security Onion setup

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Nicholas Hairs

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:32:52 AM11/27/19

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Hi SO community!

I thought it was worth documenting some things I discovered while debugging a "wifi not working" issue for either others to find, or for the community to find a more appropriate place to document / raise an issue (per github).

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Preconditions

SO Version: 16.04.6.2

Network Interfaces:

- on-board wifi
- on-board ethernet

During installation of SO, I connected to a WiFi network to update packages during install etc.

After installation, I launched into the GUI and used the same said WiFi network. WiFi networks were visible from the network-manager GUI embedded in the top menu bar.

I then ran stage 1 of the setup installer configuring the wifi device for management and the ethernet device for monitoring.

Issue

After rebooting I could wireless networks were no longer detected by the network-manager GUI embedded in the top menu bar.

I followed a number of standard Ubuntu guides for WiFi debugging:

- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessTroubleShootingGuide

- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessTroubleShootingGuide/Drivers

- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessTroubleShootingGuide/Connections

Working from low-level up I could not located any issues from the output of:

- lshw

- lsmod

- iwconfig

- rfkill list

iwlist scan would not produce any output (indicating a problem), however sudo iwlist scan did show available networks indicating that the device itself was not to blame.

I eventually came across the command nmcli device status which had my WiFi device listed as "unmanaged".

"Fix"

I edited /etc/network/interfaces and commented out the lines for my WiFi device.

I then restarted the network manager service (sudo systemctl restart network-manager).

nmcli device status then showed my WiFi device connecting to my network. The network-manager embedded GUI in the top menu bar also correctly showed the network.

In summary the issue seems to be that the setup script uses /etc/network/interfaces to manage the network interfaces which causes network-manager to lose the ability to manage the WiFi device.

- https://groups.google.com/d/topic/security-onion/lhtVNdN_sok/discussion

- https://groups.google.com/d/topic/security-onion/0n6VHGEllYI/discussion

------------------

I hope this information helps.
I don't currently have the ability to copy output / take screen grabs from my SO device so I hope the description above is enough.

Doug Burks

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Dec 6, 2019, 5:00:51 AM12/6/19

to securit...@googlegroups.com

Hi Nicholas,

I've added a Wireless Interfaces section to the Network Configuration page of our Documentation:

https://securityonion.readthedocs.io/en/latest/network-configuration.html#wireless-interfaces

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