Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

No Interfaces Available Using Wireshark on Mac OSX | 6 Comments

Posted in Code, Linux/Unix on 2nd June 2008, 8:10 am by

On my previous Macbook Pro I’d used Ethereal and I don’t remember having many issues with it as I was able to run it as sudo so that I had privileges for sniffing packets. Since then Ethereal has become Wireshark and it’s now available with a nice appication wrapper as a launcher for running it under X11. (Note this requires X11 to be installed)

After opening wireshark for the first time I had an issue that there were no interfaces to choose from due to lack of permissions. This link provides a neat solution to the problem by providing a start-up item to set the relevant permissions correctly.

The nub of the solution is to make sure you have permission to read /dev/bpf*

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  • fabrizio
  • http://digilux.es RuBiCK

    Good tip! It works for me.

    I would like to see a wireshark in cocoa :D

    Thanks!

  • http://www.techanswerguy.com Cacasodo

    Thanks Stuart! Saved me some time.
    ‘sodo

  • Sam

    The link above:
    http://www.finkconsulting.com/page7.php
    …that seems to have solved everyone’s problems, seems to be a dead link today. Could someone post the information or a new link to the information?

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Sam: I think that was just a link to installing wireshark via fink. Fink (if you’ve not seen it before) is a package manager for OSX. From experience it handles dependencies independently of system installed libs, which tends to ensure things work, but is a tad annoying when it downloads and sets-up completely new python/perl etc when you already have that installed.

    In any case here’s the link to wireshark on the fink project http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/wireshark

    Presumably the perms solution didn’t resolve the issue for you?

  • http://twitter.com/dhanakane Dhana Kaneshayogan

    Could try using sudo chown username bpfx

    There should only be a few bpf files in there. You can do it for each one.

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

Ubuntu: add-apt-repository: command not found|(3)

When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

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