Installing Wireshark – Muddled Alternatives

Installing Wireshark – Muddled Alternatives

You might have had some problems with Wireshark installations recently, I certainly have!

After installing and removing the Wireshark files from the repository, I ended up with the error message below when re-installing.

warning: %postun(wireshark-qt-2.6.4-1.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 2
Non-fatal POSTUN scriptlet failure in rpm package wireshark-qt-2.6.4-1.x86_64

Apparently the file that stores the alternatives for command aliasing might have been corrupted. So let’s remove everything we’ve got, and see what’s left.

yum remove wireshark wireshark-qt

Now we’ve removed the current wireshark RPM files, let’s have a look at the alternative aliases we’ve got left on the system.

alternatives --display wireshark
wireshark - status is auto.
link currently points to /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt
/usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt - priority 50
Current `best' version is /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

So the system thinks there is a wireshark available to run, using the wireshark-qt version. But we’ve removed them in the step before. Let’s just validate that.

# which wireshark
/usr/bin/which: no wireshark in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/home/publisher/.local/bin:/home/publisher/bin)

# which wireshark-qt
/usr/bin/which: no wireshark-qt in (/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/home/publisher/.local/bin:/home/publisher/bin)

No wireshark, or wireshark-qt files exist in the path. So this could be why we have the problem. Let’s fix it by forcibly removing the wrong value, and then re-install everything and see if that fixes things.

sudo alternatives --remove wireshark /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

yum install wireshark wireshark-qt

alternatives --display wireshark
wireshark - status is auto.
link currently points to /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt
/usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt - priority 50
Current `best' version is /usr/local/bin/wireshark-qt

Which looks the same as before, and indeed it is, but this time we have a wireshark-qt file installed on the system.

$ which wireshark
/usr/bin/wireshark
$ which wireshark-qt
/usr/bin/wireshark-qt

John Dixon

John Dixon is the Principal Consultant of thirteen-ten nanometre networks Ltd, based in Wiltshire, United Kingdom. He has a wide range of experience, (including, but not limited to) operating, designing and optimizing systems and networks for customers from global to domestic in scale. He has worked with many international brands to implement both data centres and wide-area networks across a range of industries. He is currently supporting a major SD-WAN vendor on the implementation of an environment supporting a major global fast-food chain.

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