Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Beginner diving in

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 12:18:09 -0700
Seth ... wrote:

I've managed to get to the point on this Mac PowerBook G4 where I can get
Ethereal to launch. However, when I try to "Capture" I'm getting the
following error:

"The capture session could not be initiated ((no devices found) /dev/bpf0:
Permission denied). Please check to make sure you have sufficient
permissions, and that you have the proper interface or pipe specified."

Do

	sudo chown {your login name} /dev/bpf*

or

	sudo chgrp admin /dev/bpf*

The first will let you do captures with Ethereal (or Tethereal, or tcpdump, or any other program that uses libpcap or even that directly uses BPF) as yourself; the second will let anybody in the admin group (everybody with administrator privileges) do that.

You'll have to do that the first time you run Ethereal after each reboot, as permissions and ownership of device files isn't stored on disk.