On Tuesday, October 19, 2004 at 3:01 PM, Guy Harris wrote:
Mark Pizzolato wrote:
> The ethereal project may want to proviide a tool which helps users
> (admins) do the permissioning setup on all of the available platforms,
> so then normal (possible specific) users can use the capture tools.
"Tools". The way it's done differs from platform to platform.
The next libpcap release will probably provide an OS X startup item to
set the permissions on the BPF devices; OS X has a devfs based on the
old FreeBSD one, with no configuration file and hence no ability to
configure it to set modes or owneership on particular platforms to
particular values, so it needs a startup item to set the modes.
[...]
On most BSDs (and probably AIX), it'd chmod and/or chown the BPF
devices, as they live on an on-disk file system and their modes persist
across reboots. (The old FreeBSD devfs wasn't the default.)
On recent FreeBSDs, it'd edit the configuration file for the new devfs
(which *is* the default), and either poke the system to re-read the
configuration file (if possible) or manually do the permissions changes.
You could view this as a set of disjoint platform unique tools, or like
ethereal (and libpcap), you can provide a single tool, which contains
platform specific code and attempts to be the one tool which is used to
facilitate managing this concept.
- Mark
