[Winpcap-users] Administrator privileges in order to use winpcap?

[Bryan Kadzban]

Eduardo Escudero Sánchez wrote:
> The problem is that i would like not to have the need of having admin
> privileges in order to use my application.

Do what Ethereal 0.99.0 gives you the option to do.  In the installer,
it asks whether you want to start the NPF driver at system startup time.
This allows non-admins to capture packets because starting NPF (and
maybe netmon) is the only thing that requires admin privileges.

To do this manually, go into device manager, select "show non-present
devices", find "NetGroup Packet Filter", go to its properties, find
whatever tab has the "startup" dropdown on it, and change that from
"Demand" to "Automatic".  You also might have to do the same with the
"Network Monitor" driver, although I don't know for sure.  (WinPcap 3.1
needs this driver to capture from PPP-style interfaces, though one of
its dependent DLLs always tries to start it.  Not sure about older or
newer versions.)

But:  Is there a reason you're using the packet.dll functions?  Those
are not necessarily going to be kept compatible in the future.  If you
don't need packet.dll specific stuff, then it's much better to use
wpcap.dll (the libpcap-style interface), because that *will* remain
compatible.

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