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.

[Øyvind]

Hello, 

I will need to forward this to our developer team. I hope to have an answer by tomorrow.

Kind regards,
Øyvind

[Øyvind]

Did this work with the previous version, v3.x.0?

[Mohammad Afaneh]

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.

[Vidar Berg]

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.

[Ola Oni]

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

[Vidar Berg]

Hi Ola,

We made some changes to the python scripts after this issue was reported to make handling of multiple python installations more robust, so I suspect you may encountering a different problem, even though the symptom is similar.

To troubleshoot this further, please try the following:

1. Add wireshark to your user group:

    sudo usermod -a -G wireshark $USER

2. Check Wireshark logs in /tmp/logs for errors.

[Ola Oni]

Hi Vidar,

All is well now. I ended up building wireshark from source but that ended not been the solution either. I also already had my user as part of the wireshark group.

The problem was that I copied the Nordic sniffer extcap folder contents to wireshark "Global Extcap Path" instead of "Personal Extcap Path".

My thinking was that, if it resides in the global path then any user can access it but for some reason it does not seem to be happy with this.

Other issues that was observed when using the global path was that when wireshark is started with sudo you can only start the sniffer once and to restart it, one has to close wireshark and relaunch as it says complains it can't save files.

Anyway all is working now. Thanks for your speedy response and just also can confirm that Nordic sniffer plugins works with wireshark 4.0.0

Regards

Ola