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nRF Sniffer Interface not showing up in Wireshark on macOS (11.5.1)

Mohammad Afaneh

I recently followed the instructions laid out in the "nRF Sniffer for Bluetooth LE" User Guide version 4.0.0 and having trouble seeing the nRF Sniffer interface in Wireshark (v 3.4.7).

The only way I could get it to show up is to run Wireshark as an administrator. I recall this being an issue a couple of years ago, has this not been fixed? or is there something special that needs to be done to enable Wireshark to see the nRF Sniffer when run in user mode? I can see all the other interfaces, but not the nRF Sniffer.

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  • 0 in reply to Mohammad Afaneh

    Hello, 

    Not Python environment permission, but the sniffer port itself via the group "dialout".

    E.g. adding the following permissions:

    # Add yourself to the group dialout, Log out and in again.
sudo usermod -aG dialout $USER

    Might need add Wireshark as well. 

    Let me know how that works.  Not sure about the Mac OS permission, might be best to search the web to verify 100%

    Kind regards,
    Øyvind

  • +1 in reply to Øyvind

    , I don't recall having to change permissions on my mac to get the sniffer to work. I have however had some problems related to having multiple python installations on my system that basically resulted in a different python instance being invoked from command line compared the one invoked by Wireshark.

    Could you please try the following:

    1. Open Wireshark from the terminal, but not as root, and see if it has the same effect as running Wireshark in admin mode. Apparently the PATH variable is different depending on how you launch a GUI application in macos. E.g. binaries in /usr/local/bin does not seem to get found.

    2. Try to install PySerial for other Python installations. E.g. /usr/bin/python3 -m pip install --user pyserial &&  /usr/bin/python -m pip install --user pyserial 

  • 0 in reply to Vidar Berg

    Thank you! That fixed it. serial was already installed for python 2.7 but not for python3. I suggest this be added to the user guide, as I suspect many people will face the same issue.

  • 0 in reply to Mohammad Afaneh

    Thanks for confirming! I'm glad to hear that it worked.

    Mohammad Afaneh said:
    I suggest this be added to the user guide, as I suspect many people will face the same issue

    Yes, I agree with you. I believe I have a pretty good understanding of the problem now and I will request an update of the user guide.

  • 0 in reply to Vidar Berg

    Hi All,

    I am a new comer to Bluetooth and recently bought nRf52840 dongle to be used as a sniffer. I seems to be experiencing the same exact problem as described by Mohammad. The only difference is that I am on an Ubuntu Cinnamon  22.04 64-bit machine.

    If I use sudo wireshark then I can see and use the sniffer okay but not as a normal user. My user is already in the "wireshark" and "dialout" group.

    I can see other interfaces but just not nrfNordic one.

    As part of the installation I installed python3 so the above did solution does not work for me.

    Many thanks in advance.

    Ola

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