Re: tcpdump and libpcap releases, and future thoughts

[Michal Sekletar <msekleta () redhat com>]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 03:34:14PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
> I pushed the button on libpcap 1.6.2 early last night.
> This includes patches that Guy asked for.  It seems that we might
> need more patches to better select Linux memory mapped packet
> choices?
>
> I pushed the button on tcpdump 4.6.2 later that night.
> I was trying to use libnetdissect in another project, and that needs
> tcpdump, and I needed both amd64 and x86 versions to make everything
> work nicely under Travis-CI, so I used the ../../sourcecode/configure
> method to build outside the source tree, and found that tcpdump couldn't find
> libpcap properly.  I also found a related bug in an
> AC_MSG_ERROR(). Apparently , is a bad thing to have an error message,
> and putting "" around things just confuses m4.
>
> I would like to move all of the source for libnetdissect into a subdir,
> and make it easier to build just that part, and finally introduce my
> idea for a second main()/getopt() containing top-level program for tcpdump,
> one which is not called tcpdump, but rather "pktdump".
>
> pktdump would start with a clean slate of -SingleLetter options, probably
> starting with *no* single letter options, only --long-options, and we
> can decide which ones deserve shortcuts....  I think we already have a
> BSD licensed getopt_long in missing/ I guess I could go check... yes.

Hi, 

this request is a bit unrelated to your proposal, but I think it better be
considered sooner than later.

In the future I'd like to see pktdump to implement an architecture which would
allow a user to run a packet dissector completely unprivileged. Meaning, that
*all* privileged operations are done by a very tiny server program running on
the side. We could then not implement equivalent of -Z option and possibly hook
up the pktdump with an authentication mechanism like polkit or similar.

Michal

> I'm open to suggestions on other ways to proceed.
>
> --
> ]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
> ]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
> ]     mcr () sandelman ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [
>
>
>
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