IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is deprecated, updated documentation can be found here

It is highly recommended to use a enhanced and patched driver from http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~p_larbig/wlan/ instead of serialmonkey drivers.

ifconfig rausb0 down
rmmod rt2570
wget http://homepages.tu-darmstadt.de/~p_larbig/wlan/rt2570-k2wrlz-1.6.3.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf rt2570-k2wrlz-1.6.3.tar.bz2
cd rt2570-k2wrlz-1.6.3/Module
make && make install
modprobe rt2570

Make sure to load the driver with modprobe (not insmod).

Make sure you have the newest version 1.6.3 installed. It has fixes for the new kernel version 2.6.27.

Note that this driver currently does not work on big endian systems, such as the PowerPC. Attempting to run “ifconfig rausb0 up” will cause ifconfig to use 100% CPU power, bringing your system to a crawl and never actually working.

There are reports of the aircrack-ng tools freezing and/or stop working.

Here are a few things to try:

• Try lowering injection rate
• Disable USB Legacy support in BIOS
• Use the newest kernel you can get
• Try to use a non SMP version of your kernel
• If the hardware totally loses its function: Use the oven method to get it back to life: http://forum.aircrack-ng.org/index.php?topic=233.msg6371#msg6371

See this message.

If you have a Ralink chip in an USB device and that chip is a RT2570 or RT73 (RT73 is also known as RT2571 and RT2573), you need the “rt2570” or “rt73” driver. The “rt2500” driver is only for PCI/PCMCIA devices.

Using legacy drivers (or ASPj mods) interface name is ra0 for PCI/PCMCIA and rausb0 for USB devices, if you have wlan0 and wmaster0 interfaces, then you are using new rt2x00 driver (rt2x00 has various modules, for USB devices they are “rt2x00lib”, “rt2x00usb” and “rt2500usb”, unload them and load “rt2570” if you want to use the other driver).