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Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] modern Wireshark RPMs for RHEL/CentOS (Was: lua starter (t

From: Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2015 21:44:42 -0500
On 02/12/2015 06:03 PM, Guy Harris wrote:

On Feb 12, 2015, at 7:21 AM, Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The big problem with RHEL/CentOS is that there isn't a repository with a modern Wireshark (that I am aware of).

Fedora uses pretty modern Wiresharks now but of course the enterprise distros don't upgrade.

CentOS 7 is really out there on the bleeding edge - they're up to 1.10.3!

	http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/Packages/

Does that mean that RHEL 7 is also providing something equally shiny and new?

Yes. CentOS is "just" a rebrand + recompile of CentOS. Their goal is to be the same so the versions must therefore be the same.

(And should we consider building our own RPM packages, and offering them for whatever the Red Hat/CentOS equivalent is to Ubuntu PPAs if there is such an equivalent?  Unfortunately, that might mean building on various versions of RHEL/CentOS if we don't want to make the packages dependent on special packages of its dependencies.)

That would be a wonderful idea. I'd even contemplated suggesting the same and/or committing to keeping some server online, making it a buildbot, etc., etc., but, well, so far it's seemed like too much work (mainly the "keeping a server online" bit").

I don't know what a PPA is but it's easy enough to set up a yum repository and tell people how to install it--that way they need only "yum install" or "yum update" to get our packages. I have an internal repository at work from which I distribute (modern) Wireshark RPMs. It only takes a small configuration file, an appropriate directory structure, a web server (to serve up the RPMs), and a simple shell script to update the repo after adding packages.

Realistically distributing RPMs would require 1 or 2 VMs: one for CentOS 6 and one for CentOS 7 (CentOS 5 is stuck with Wireshark 1.8(?) because of its Gtk+ version). (An advantage of RHEL/CentOS is the versions are few and far between.)

(If we cared about 32-bit RPMs it should be possible to generate a 32-bit RPM on a 64-bit Red Hat system--at least I was previously able to compile and run a 32-bit Wireshark on a 64-bit Fedora but I never tried building an RPM.)

If Gerald or someone wants to set up the VMs then I certainly could volunteer to do most of the rest of the work.