Ethereal-users: Re: [ethereal-users] Re: Problems running Ethereal 0.4.1

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From: gerald@xxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 22:27:52 -0500 (CDT)
On Sun, 18 Oct 1998, Keith Morse wrote:

> Sniffing requires   the interface your on to be in promiscous mode.  In my
> experience to put an ethernet adapter in that mode you have to be running
> as root.  I just tried as me and then as root.  Me: no work, root: work.

  Under Linux, you need root priveleges in order to put an interface in
promiscuous mode.  Other OSes will let you do this if you have write
access to a particular entry under /dev, e.g. /dev/bpf on BSDish systems.

  Ethereal doesn't currently make any calls to setuid(), so enabling the
corresponding bit on the executable won't have any effect.  A security
review hasn't been done on the code, so it's probably a bit premature to
add this sort of functionality.  (I think it's bad enough that the program
has to be run as root on most systems.  :)

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