How to use wireshark?

Support & Help Requests
1

I’ve just installed wireshark on mate 16, and it says it can’t do anything. I’ve read the “how to capture” doc and it seems dumpcap needs root privileges. And yes if I “sudo dumpcap” I think I can get it to capture. It says it’s saved the capture to “output.pcapng”, But where is this? A caja search can’t find it.
In the old days I just manually selected which interface I wanted, hit capture and away it went, there was nothing complicated about it.
I answered the “allow non root users to capture” question with a yes so I’m surprised it needs root privileges.
I tried “sudo wireshark” but there’s no such command.

Any thoughts kind people?

2

Hi @decrepit,

I have no idea myself so try their FAQ’s here:

https://ask.wireshark.org/faq/

3

For Wireshark to work for non-root users, the wireshark group needs to be added to the user account.

  1. Go to Users & Groups (System → Administration)
  2. Click “Manage Groups”
  3. Select “wireshark” and open its properties.
  4. Tick your user account.
  5. Save, log out then log back in. :slight_smile:
3 Likes
4

i use this to get it working: sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common

5

Thanks guys, I followed lah7’s advice first and it’s up and running. I thought by the help files it would be something simple like that, But they assumed too much knowledge of how to manage groups.

1 Like