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[SOLVED]wireshark says mintbox has no useable interface..?

Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2014 7:25 pm
by colinmcc
I haven't used wireshark before on my mintbox, but need to do so. However after installing wireshark 1.6.7 and starting it I am told under the capture heading "No interface can be used for capturing in this system with the current configuration. See capture help for details. "

However I can not find any reference to this message there. Is anyone successfully using wireshark on a mint box? Or, can you advise please as to how to get wireshark to work with the lan interface in the mint box..

Thank you

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Re: wireshark says mintbox has no useable interface..?

Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2014 12:35 am
by colinmcc
AaaaH... Should have Googled that message. What wireshark is really saying is that it doesn't have permission to access the lan port, only root can do that.

So tried sudo wireshark and it shows my interfaces and wireshark works ;-)

However wireshark then has a popup about not using root privileges, so I found:

http://cmc.site11.com/2011/08/ubuntu-10 ... le-solved/ which gives the wireshark author's way.

- raise the capture privileges for the desired user, by adding capturing capabilities:

Note: This is the recommended way by the Wireshark creators.

Open a terminal.
sudo addgroup -system wireshark
sudo chown root:wireshark /usr/bin/dumpcap
sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/bin/dumpcap

and run the following changing YOUR_USER_NAME with the desired user name:

sudo usermod -a -G wireshark YOUR_USER_NAME

Then just start Wireshark and select the network interface.

Worked for me, my network interfaces showed up and I can capture traffic.