Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Yet another libcap question....

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:58:18 -0800
Chris Nighswonger wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I've run into the proverbial pcap.h issue. I'm running FC6 and have
> both libcap and libcap-devel installed via Yum. Most likely neither
> included the pcap.h header file. So, my question is: Can I simply
> download the libcap source and do a "make install-incl" to obtain the
> missing files WITHOUT damaging my current install of libcap and
> libcap-devel (since nearly the entire system depends on these)?

You might want to double-check that you have libpcap and libpcap-devel
(the packet capture library) installed, and not libcap and libcap-devel
(the Linux/POSIX capabilities library).  It's pretty easy to get tripped
up by this.


BTW, do any popular Linux distributions support file system capabilities
out of the box yet?  It'd be nice to be able to grant CAP_NET_RAW to
Wireshark/TShark instead of having to run as root.  Capabilities have
been in the kernel for a few years now, after all...