[Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>]

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 OS X, doing the permissioning setup would involve:
>
>     installing the startup item;
>
>     editing the script that does the work;
>
>     running the startup item.
>
> 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.
Hmmm, well, great, now I'm completely confused :-(

Is it a good idea to split capture and other Ethereal code or is it 
useless????

Regards, ULFL