How should wireshark be configured to run by non-root user?

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1

I installed wireshark using YaST. When I tried to capture, I got the message:

Couldn’t run /usr/bin/dumpcap in child process: Permission denied
You need to be a member of the ‘wireshark’ group. Try running
‘usermod -a -G wireshark <YOUR_USERNAME>’ as root.

There is no wireshark group. I could create one and add myself to it. Clearly I have to give that group permissions needed to capture packages. This article describes one way of doing this in an older version of OpenSuSE:

I prefer not to reassign permissions as is described in the article since it might break something else. Is there a clean and easy way to set up wireshark to run as a non-root user?

2

I installed wireshark from the main OSS repo, and the ‘wireshark’ group was available as a result.

For reference I have

~> ls -l /usr/bin/dumpcap
-rwxr-x--- 1 root wireshark 121328 May 10 03:25 /usr/bin/dumpcap

A similar recent topic

3

OK, maybe the wireshark group was there. After I did the ‘usermod …’ as root, I did ‘groups’ as me and only saw “users”. But I now see ‘groups <my_user_id>’ shows “users wireshark”. I see my user id in /etc/group wireshark:x:456:<my_user_id>

I can execute dumpcap as root, but get “permission denied” as me. My ‘/usr/dumpcal’ has the same permissions as yours.

4

I figured out that I had to log out and back in to get my new group membership to work. It now works.

5

Yes, a new session required to see the group that was added. Good to read that it is now working for you as expected.

6

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