3 Installing Wireshark on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/DragonFly BSD
4 ========================================================================
6 1. Extra packages required
8 3. Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) requirement
9 4. Running Wireshark as a non-root user
12 1. Extra packages required
13 ---------------------------
14 Wireshark requires a number of additional programs to function.
15 Install the latest versions of the following programs before compiling:
31 The easiest way to install these is by using your operating system's
32 ports or packages system.
35 2. Compiling Wireshark
36 -----------------------
37 To compile Wireshark with the default options, run configure, make and
44 The configure and make steps can be run as a non-root user and you can
45 run Wireshark from the compilation directory itself. You must run make
46 install as root in order to copy the program to the proper directories.
49 3. Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) requirement
50 --------------------------------------------
51 In order to capture packets (with Wireshark/TShark, tcpdump, or any
52 other packet capture program) on a BSD system, your kernel must have the
53 Berkeley Packet Filter mechanism enabled. The default kernel
54 configurations in recent versions of BSD systems have this enabled
55 already. To verify the bpf device is present, look in the /dev
60 You should see one or more bpf devices listed similar to this:
62 crw------- 1 root wheel 0, 90 Aug 10 21:05 /dev/bpf0
63 crw------- 1 root wheel 0, 91 Aug 10 21:05 /dev/bpf1
65 Packet-capturing programs will pick the first bpf device that's not in
66 use. Recent versions of most BSDs will create bpf devices as needed, so
67 you don't have to configure the number of devices that will be
70 4. Running wireshark as a non-root user
71 -------------------------------------------
72 Since the bpf devices are read-only by the owner (root), you normally
73 have to run packet capturing programs such as Wireshark as root. It is
74 safer to run programs as a non-root user if possible. To run Wireshark
75 as a non-root user, you must change the permissions on the bpf device(s).
76 If you are the only user that needs to use Wireshark, the easiest way
77 is to change the owner of each bpf device to your username. You can also
78 add the read/write ability to the group (typically wheel) and add users
79 that need to use Wireshark to the wheel group. Check your operating
80 system's documentation on how to make permanent these changes as they
81 are often reset upon reboot; if /dev is implemented with devfs, it might
82 be possible to configure devfs to create all bpf devices owned by a
83 particular user and/or group and with particular permissions. In
84 FreeBSD 6.0 and later this can be done by creating an /etc/devfs.rules
85 file with content such as
88 add path 'bpf*' {mode and permissons}
90 where "mode and permissions" can include clauses such as
92 mode {octal permissions}
94 to set the permissions on the device (e.g., "mode 0660" to set the
95 permissions to rw-rw-r--),
99 to set the user who owns the device, or
103 to set the group that owns the device and adding a line such as
105 devfs_system_ruleset=localrules
107 to /etc/rc.conf. For example, an /etc/devfs.rules file with
110 add path 'bpf*' mode 0660 group wheel
112 will grant read and write permissions on all BPF devices to all users in