I have a dissector written in Lua for a custom protocol that I would like to decode in wireshark. I placed the Lua script in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/wireshark/plugins/3.2/ and restarted wireshark. How can I load and apply the dissector on a sample pcap trace?
I am using wireshark v3.2.1 on Ubuntu 18.04.
Thanks in advance.
See the Developers Guide, Section 10 - Introduction to Lua.
Thanks @grahamb, had a look there! I loaded the Lua script explicitly by passing -X lua_script:<script_name> to wireshark while starting it.
I guess my issue is that when I load a pcap file and select a packet and hit "Decode as", I do not see my custom dissector. I checked also in Analyze --> Enabled Protocols for my custom protocol to no avail.
Any thoughts on what might be the issue? Do I need to rebuild wireshark in order to load the dissector?
Note that I built wireshark from source (it is the latest stable release).
P.S.: I double-checked the plugins directory in Help --> About --> Folders and ensured that the Lua script exists in both the Personal and Global plugins directory.
Turns out Lua was not enabled as wireshark 3.2.1 requires Lua version >= 5.1. So I installed Lua 5.2 from source and rebuilt wireshark with the correct paths (LUA_LIBRARY, LUA_INCLUDE_DIR etc.). it now finds the Lua installation, however complains that the header lua.h is missing.
So I checked the location of the Lua install and turns out my build has not copied the libs and headers in the configured path. I will now install Lua as Debian package and recheck.
Below the contents of Wireshark About:
3.2.1 (Git commit bf38a67724d0)
Compiled (64-bit) with Qt 5.9.5, with libpcap, without POSIX capabilities,
without libnl, with GLib 2.56.4, with zlib 1.2.11, without SMI, without c-ares,
without Lua, without GnuTLS, with Gcrypt 1.8.1, without Kerberos, without
MaxMind DB resolver, without nghttp2, without brotli, with LZ4, without
Zstandard, without Snappy ...Did install the -dev package but wireshark build fails with the same error. Rebuilt wireshark with the correct Lua install paths and it now works. Thanks again for your help. Much appreciated!
Asked: 2020-02-11 20:25:53 +0000
Seen: 9,499 times
Last updated: Feb 11 '20