Replacing pypcap with something more usable?

[molnarg]

The pypcap module seems to be abandoned, and it is nearly impossible to install it on Fedora. What about moving to something more widespread and maintained?

[hgn]

Sure, any new suggestions for the "bright new pcap star"?

There is no reason why not switch to another library. For Debian pypcap works and there are no shortcoming currently. But you are free to provide alternatives!

[molnarg]

Well, after looking around, there are no real alternatives... There's pcapy and pylibpcap but none of them seems to be better than pypcap.

In case anyone finds this page because of having problem with pypcap on fedora, here's the right way to compile pypcap.

wget 'http://anduin.linuxfromscratch.org/sources/BLFS/6.3/l/libpcap-0.9.6.tar.gz'
tar -xvzf libpcap-0.9.6.tar.gz
cd libpcap-0.9.6
./configure && make

cd ..
svn checkout http://pypcap.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pypcap
cd pypcap
python setup.py config
make
sudo make install

IMPORTANT:

• use the libpcap version specified above (libpcap trunk, stock fedora libpcap-devel package, and libpcap 0.8, which is suggested by the pypcap README won't work)
• use the pypcap svn trunk, the provided tarballs are out of date, and have bugs in the build script

[molnarg]

And one more note. The pypcap build script will find libpcap only if the libpcap directory is a sibling to the pypcap directory, and you don't have libpcap-devel installed globally.

[hgn]

I will add a link to this issue on the homepage! Thank you!