USB wifi adapters can't get DHCP lease

[dkennedy2011101]

I'm using a Mac with Fusion as the host and running a Kali Linux VM. Main connection to the Internet is via the Mac's wifi which is bridged. That works fine.

I want to use USB wifi adapters with the Kali VM. I can connect, and the adapters come up (in Kali) as wlan0, wlan1 etc. I can also get them to scan APs using iwlist scan. But the adapters can't obtain a DHCP lease.

Do I need to 'connect' them to the Mac and use bridged networking instead? I was hoping to be able to control them from the Kali VM because I want to be able to use monitor mode etc.

[WoodyZ]

While I've not had an occasion of late to use a USB WiFi Network Adapter connected directly to a Virtual Machine nonetheless in the past when I did I had no problems.  That said each OS I connected it to was officially supported by the USB WiFi Network Adapter's Manufacture and I installed the appropriate software/drivers necessary for it to function as intended.s

That said, assuming you've done the same, then the only suggestion I have other then performing normal diagnostics as if running from a Physical Machine it to try configuring the device statically vs using DHCP as a workaround and or just to see if the device can work at at.

[witchbutter303]

Technically if you are bridging your NIC and you want to keep the host networking transparent to the VM you can just keep the wifi adapter running in OSX and the VM (assuming vmware tools is working) will automatically switch over to the wifi adapter on the host when the hosts wire is disconnected.

Otherwise if you really need to pass USB to the guest, then all of your network functions are dependent on the guest OS driver.  I would be looking for a reason why Kali linux can't handle dhcp in that scenario.  In linux a lot of wifi adapters still need a fair amount of manual configuration to work at all.