Wireshark with no capture interface under Ubuntu

Wireshark

Introduction :
This all started as I needed a sniffer for testing purpose. I choose Wireshark(Ethereal) as it kinda the defacto standard for sniffing as its free and very powerful with the filters.

Enviroment :
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
VMware Workstation 6.0.3
Wireshark v1.0.0

Installation / Usage :
After installation, it I started it up from the menu

Applications > Internet > Wireshark

Then when I tried showing the available capture interfaces, there were non shown. Initially I thought it was either a VMware bug or Ubuntu 8.04 issue. But after some research it seem that it was a privileges related.

Quote from Wireshark wiki

Running Wireshark (or any other network capture/analyzer, for that matter) on Linux needs root privileges. Therefore, you have to have root privileges when starting Wireshark, else you can’t capture data. Please note that you don’t have to login as root when starting your computer, you can use su(1) or sudo(8) for that purpose. However, this remains unsecure as the dissectors, the parts of Wireshark which parse the captured data, run with root privileges as they did before. A much safer solution would be to su(1) to root, then use the bundled dumpcap to dump the data (for example, you can evoke dumpcap by using “dumpcap -w ./dumpfile”, which will dump the packets to the file “dumpfile” in the current working directory. See “dumpcap -h” for details). You could also use tcpdump for this purpose. The advantage of this solution is, while dumpcap/tcpdump still run as root, you can run Wireshark as a ordinary user and load the data you captured previously, so effectively this is kinda “privilege separation by hand”.

Solution was just to run Wireshark with root privileges

sudo wireshark

!! If wish to sniff under promiscuous mode using the WireShark under VMware, you need to run VMware with root privileges as well or create a group with root privileges and run it off that group.

Happy sniffing :)

References :

June 20, 2008 | Filed Under Linux, Network, Tech 
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