[Hackrf-dev] HackRF in a Virtualized Environment (Windows7>VmWare>Pentoo\Kali\Ubuntu)

[Sohil Shah]

Zero_Chaos,

Thanks for the response it was very informative. No shame in being publicly
shot down, especially from an expert it's a great learning experience :)

I wanted to mention a few things in response though. Some are corrections
to my original email, some suggestions and some follow up questions.

1) So far what I had gathered from all sources was that only performance
and data rates would get hurt running in a VM, hence the preference for
bare metal. This is the first time I have heard of the actual USB
passthough issue being soo massive, most blogs I read people had made it
work somehow. I had problems a few years ago when I was trying to use it
with my AWUS036NH card in Backtrack4r2 and up. I always figured it was an
issue at my side as a lot of people were able to use it properly[Vivek
Ramachandran in his Security Tube videos]. For the life of me I never
understood why airmon-ng would pick up data when run for the first time on
a fresh host and guest install and then would never ever work again, is
that what you were referring to with the rfkill option ? I think the fact
that an expert like you has had the same frustrating experience I feel much
better now that it wasn't that I did not try hard but that the inherent
problem is so muti-faceted that there is no conclusive solution for it.

2) When I mentioned Intel Chipset I forgot to add a link to
http://www.ettus.com/kb/detail/usrp-b200-and-b210-usb-30-streaming-rate-benchmarks
even though this was for USB3 I assumed that there would be similar
performance characteristics with USB2. I mentioned I have a Lenovo ThinkPad
T430 I forgot to mention it has the Intel QM77 Express chipset and Intel 7
series/c216 Chupset family USB enhanced Host controller. Any
comments/suggestions on this particular USB chipset?

3) Based on what you have said I think its a software problem(particularly
the handling of the USB software stuff) than a hardware problem so I hope
with time someone comes up with a solution for the same in the mean time I
will take your advice and go with using it on Bare Metal. I have suffered
enough in the Virtualized environment. Though barring CPU cycles and any
hardware limitation do you think using something like BorIP with some
extensions would be a better solution?

4) I can't use dual boot for reasons I don't want to go into here, but its
not a technical limitation it's a different problem. I will however use the
Live CD/USB boot option.

5) Speaking about Live CD/USB boot I have had an issue with Kali and other
Linux flavors in the past wherein they mount or do something to my NTFS
partitions even when I have never tried using the NTFS partitions while in
the Live boot environment. Is there a way for you to auto writeblock the
disks in your upcoming version of Pentoo like a lot of the Forensic Distros
like Helix etc do. It would help with not having to deal with NTFS
corruption caused by the Live CDs/USBs. Is your latest build going to have
a persistence boot mode similar to the latest version of Kali? I have never
used Pentoo before but I'd be happy if this comes out of the box or there
is a fairly straightforward way to do this as I'd like to spend more time
learning DSP/SDR than tinkering around with the environment.

6) I think there was some confusion about by 2 host setup. Basically I was
trying to have one host with a hacrf and the other host would be
interacting with it in a way similar to remoting into it. Not trying to use
hackrf_tcp though that seems quite interesting.

Again thank you for your time and all the clarifications. It's really
appreciated.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nine.pairlist.net/pipermail/hackrf-dev/attachments/20140904/6b0d732f/attachment.html>