Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] A couple of questions / maybe feature requests - related to
On Monday, June 23, 2003, at 9:50AM, Dolbow, Bill wrote:
1. Listing all ethernet interfaces on the system on the capture pull
down
instead of the active IP interfaces only. I posted a question about
this
before but I was wondering if this is on the radar screen to enhance.
At some point, we will probably make it possible for Ethereal to use
"pcap_findalldevs()" on platforms that have it; on those platforms,
*if* that routine can find interfaces that have no IP addresses (it can
do so, for example, on Linux, which is a platform where the SIOCGIFCONF
"ioctl" used by Ethereal doesn't find those interfaces), it will be
able to show those interfaces.
You would have to build your own libpcap and build Ethereal to use it,
however, if the OS doesn't supply such a version of libpcap (0.7 and
later).
Is there a way to have the etherent alias be displayed in the pull
down also.
What do you mean by "the Ethernet alias"?
2. Add the ability to add a personal title (-title command line
option), so
as we are using a bunch of different ethereal instances we can keep
straight
which one is which.
If the instances have capture files open, the file name should be in
the title. We can probably add a UI option to let you override it and
give it a more meaningful, or shorter, name.
It would be nice if the title also appeared on the capture.
The libpcap format used by Ethereal currently has no place to store a
title. This may change at some point. There is no time schedule for
such a change.
3. Ability to run as non-root. I read a bunch of past postings but it
looks like there is still no way to run as non-root on redhat 7-9.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, no Linux distribution has gotten
around to making all that nice capability-bit stuff in the kernel
conveniently usable from userland, e.g. by providing some way of giving
accounts a list of capability bits and turning those bits on for the
top-level processes when a user logs in (I assume they're inherited by
child processes). If that were supported, you could just give accounts
the CAP_NET_RAW capability (to let them sniff) and CAP_NET_ADMIN or
something such as that (so they can get a list of the interfaces -
that's not a *requirement* for capturing, but it's a requirement for
the drop-down list in Ethereal, and the "-D" flag in Tethereal and
current-CVS tcpdump, to work).
Is there a workaround to this or any ideas how to manage it in a multi
ethereal user
environment?
None that I know of, other than "su" or "sudo" (which I don't count as
"running as non-root"; they're just ways of running applications as
root if you're not logged in as root).
