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Wireshark ChmodBPF errors on Snow Leopard

October 3rd, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

When I got Snow Leopard, I decided to do some house cleaning. I wiped the disk and reinstalled everything from scratch. I didn’t have any problems along the way until I went to install my favorite network protocol analyzer: Wireshark.

Installing is a simple matter of dragging the application into your Applications folder, but there’s also a startup item that sets some necessary permissions. To set that up, go into the Utilities folder on the Wireshark disk image, and drag the ChmodBPF folder onto the StartupItems shortcut. It’ll prompt you to authenticate and then copy. If you restart at this point, you’ll get an error message that says “Insecure Startup Item disabled. – “/Library/StartupItems/ChmodBPF” has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings.”

Using information from an Apple support article, I realized you need to change the owner of the scripts for them to be run on startup. Run the command below and everything will work fine!

cd /Library/StartupItems
sudo chown -R root:wheel ChmodBPF
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Categories: Misc Tags:
  1. October 9th, 2009 at 04:26 | #1

    IT WORKS :D thank you.

  2. November 3rd, 2009 at 06:06 | #2

    Yesss!!! Thank you!

    For others who will undoubtedly run into the same problem, I’ll make the following note:

    The fact that ChmodBPF is failing to set the correct permissions will go unnoticed to the majority of users, because the ““Insecure Startup Item disabled” error, is of course only visible at the command line.

    However, at a higher level, the very real and visual problem, that this will solve is that “The wireshark interface list is empty”

    That was my problem and it took a little bit of detective work to track down the ultimate culprit. But now everything up and running, thanks again to this tip :-)

  3. Vi
    November 10th, 2009 at 17:52 | #3

    Thank you for this tip. It was the last step I needed to get Wireshark working.

  4. Richard
    November 25th, 2009 at 13:03 | #4

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!
    I can now diagnose my Draytek router when it loses DNS connectivity over Wifi.

  5. November 30th, 2009 at 16:24 | #5

    Thanks – That’s been bugging me for a while now…

  6. December 5th, 2009 at 17:12 | #6

    Awesome, thanks!

  7. Marco
    January 13th, 2010 at 09:03 | #7

    Good job! Thanks a lot

  8. Bill
    January 23rd, 2010 at 13:40 | #8

    Thank you so much. This was driving me crazy only being able to get it to work from the command line.

  1. October 13th, 2009 at 15:03 | #1