Bug 15073 – kismet init script problems

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED TEST-REQUEST

[Description Justin 2003-02-03 16:33:26 UTC]

I have found several problems with the kismet init script. First, the method
used to determine whether the wireless card has monitor mode doesn't work when
using the wlan-ng drivers (wlan-ng doesn't have and 802.11b ioctls, so iwpriv
doesn't give any useful information). I already spoke to latexer about this on
irc (i'm Boogaloo).
Second, and more importantly, the init script doesn't actually start
kismet_server. The script reports that it was successful, but kismet_server is
not running after the script completes and the pidfile doesn't exist.
kismet_server will run is the --background option for start-stop-deamon is
removed, but that's another problem for obvious reasons.
Third, (latexer found this one, i'm just adding it here to remind him :) ) the
pidfile created for kismet_hopper is different in start() and stop()....this is
just a typo, really.

One more thing i'd like to point out is that there's a line in
/etc/kismet/kismet.conf that tells kismet_server what user to run as (for
security purposes...the line is suiduser=user_name). kismet_server must run in a
directory that this user has write permissions to (because it writes dump files,
etc, to the working directory).

Hope this is of some help,
Justin

[Comment 1 Peter Johanson (RETIRED) 2003-02-04 23:57:55 UTC]

New tarball w/ initscripts should be propogating soon.

Kismet server will _not_ start from the init script if you do not set a full path to a writeable directory for the logtemplate setting in /etc/kismet/kismet.conf
e.g.

suiduser=foo
logtemplate=/home/foo/kismet/%n-%d-%i.%l

Soon as i have a card to test the wlan-ng drivers w/ (coming in the mail tomorrow), i'll fix the script to work w/ wlan-ng stuff to. Until then, comment out the three lines in /etc/init.d/kismet

[Comment 2 Andrew Cooks (RETIRED) 2003-11-29 14:05:27 UTC]

This bug is more than 180 days old.

I'm resolving as TEST-REQUEST. Please reopen if the problem persists.