$Id$ Installing Wireshark on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/DragonFly BSD ======================================================================== 1. Extra packages required 2. Compiling Wireshark 3. Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) requirement 4. Running Wireshark as a non-root user 1. Extra packages required --------------------------- Wireshark requires a number of additional programs to function. Install the latest versions of the following programs before compiling: atk cairo expat gettext glib2 glitz gtk2 / gtk+2 jpeg pango pkgconfig png tiff The easiest way to install these is by using your operating system's ports or packages system. 2. Compiling Wireshark ----------------------- To compile Wireshark with the default options, run configure, make and make install (you may have to run "autogen.sh" first): ./configure make make install The configure and make steps can be run as a non-root user and you can run Wireshark from the compilation directory itself. You must run make install as root in order to copy the program to the proper directories. 3. Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) requirement -------------------------------------------- In order to capture packets (with Wireshark/TShark, tcpdump, or any other packet capture program) on a BSD system, your kernel must have the Berkeley Packet Filter mechanism enabled. The default kernel configurations in recent versions of BSD systems have this enabled already. To verify the bpf device is present, look in the /dev directory: ls -l /dev/bpf* You should see one or more bpf devices listed similar to this: crw------- 1 root wheel 0, 90 Aug 10 21:05 /dev/bpf0 crw------- 1 root wheel 0, 91 Aug 10 21:05 /dev/bpf1 Packet-capturing programs will pick the first bpf device that's not in use. Recent versions of most BSDs will create bpf devices as needed, so you don't have to configure the number of devices that will be available. 4. Running wireshark as a non-root user ------------------------------------------- Since the bpf devices are read-only by the owner (root), you normally have to run packet capturing programs such as Wireshark as root. It is safer to run programs as a non-root user if possible. To run Wireshark as a non-root user, you must change the permissions on the bpf device(s). If you are the only user that needs to use Wireshark, the easiest way is to change the owner of each bpf device to your username. You can also add the read/write ability to the group (typically wheel) and add users that need to use Wireshark to the wheel group. Check your operating system's documentation on how to make permanent these changes as they are often reset upon reboot; if /dev is implemented with devfs, it might be possible to configure devfs to create all bpf devices owned by a particular user and/or group and with particular permissions. In FreeBSD 6.0 and later this can be done by creating an /etc/devfs.rules file with content such as [localrules=10] add path 'bpf*' {mode and permissions} where "mode and permissions" can include clauses such as mode {octal permissions} to set the permissions on the device (e.g., "mode 0660" to set the permissions to rw-rw-r--), user {user} to set the user who owns the device, or group {group} to set the group that owns the device and adding a line such as devfs_system_ruleset=localrules to /etc/rc.conf. For example, an /etc/devfs.rules file with [localrules=10] add path 'bpf*' mode 0660 group wheel will grant read and write permissions on all BPF devices to all users in the "wheel" group.