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Add updates noting that the BPF devices and BPF driver might not exist
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until you run AIX's tcpdump at least once.
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yuguy committed May 31, 2002
1 parent 23b1f47 commit d0dc7ff
Showing 1 changed file with 24 additions and 8 deletions.
32 changes: 24 additions & 8 deletions README.aix
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(1) AIX 4.x's version of BPF is undocumented and somewhat unstandard; the
current BPF support code includes changes that should work around
that, but, lacking an AIX machine on which to compile it, we don't
know whether the BPF support for AIX will compile.

If it doesn't, or if the workarounds fail to make it work correctly,
you should send to tcpdump-workers@tcpdump.org a detailed bug report
(if the compile fails, send us the compile error messages; if it
that; it appears to compile and work on at least one AIX 4.3.3
machine.

Note that the BPF driver and the "/dev/bpf" devices might not exist
on your machine; AIX's tcpdump appears to load the driver and create
the devices if they don't already exist. Our libpcap doesn't create
them, so you should run (as the super-user) AIX's tcpdump once (you
can interrupt it as soon as it starts capturing packets) to create
the devices. Do this before running the configure script, so that
the configure script finds the BPF devices and chooses to configure
libpcap to use BPF.

It may be that you will need to do this after every reboot; we don't
know whether that's the case, and, if it is the case, don't know
whether there's a way to force the driver to be loaded on a reboot.
(We also don't know how to make libpcap create the devices and, if
necessary, load the driver.)

(2) If libpcap doesn't compile on your machine when configured to use
BPF, or if the workarounds fail to make it work correctly, you
should send to tcpdump-workers@tcpdump.org a detailed bug report (if
the compile fails, send us the compile error messages; if it
compiles but fails to work correctly, send us as detailed as
possible a description of the symptoms, including indications of the
network link-layer type being wrong or time stamps being wrong).
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to the "configure" script for libpcap.

(2) Also, it is a good idea to have the latest version of the DLPI
(3) Also, it is a good idea to have the latest version of the DLPI
driver on your system, since certain versions may be buggy and
cause your AIX system to crash. DLPI is included in the
fileset bos.rte.tty. I found that the DLPI driver that came with
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These updates can be installed with the smit program.

(3) After compiling libpcap, you need to make sure that the DLPI driver
(4) After compiling libpcap, you need to make sure that the DLPI driver
is loaded. Type:

strload -q -d dlpi
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