Providing debug information

Providing debug information

When you experience a bug in ettercap and raise an issue on Github, it's quite probable that you'll be asked to recompile ettercap from the Github source in debug mode, in order to provide a debug log file.

Since this short sentence may sound quite scary for some people who never got in touch with that, this Wiki page is intended to explain the background and give some guidance through this process.

Background

Ettercap processes network data. Sometimes there are such unthinkable things on the wire, or the environment (computer) is set up quite uncommonly that ettercap may not be prepared and you face a unwanted behavior or even worse a crash due to a segmentation or memory fault.

When you report such an issue, all these things are not known to the developers and contributors of ettercap who are willing helping you. Since we can not have access to your computer to troubleshoot the problem directly, we heavily rely on the information that is provided. The more detailed, the more accurate, the better.

In most cases, you're probably using a pre-compiled version of ettercap coming from your favorite distribution. This is in general good as this way, automatic upgrades are systematically addressed. But the pre-compiled versions of ettercap do not generate much data which is useful for debugging, as Ettercap is supposed to do something else than collecting debug information.

However in the event to troubleshoot your problem, you need to put some efforts in order to provide this information.

Process

Clean your system from the distribution provided version of ettercap

First you need to purge ettercap from your computer.

An example for a Debian based system would look like:

# apt-get purge ettercap

Sometimes the package is called differently so it makes sense to check how it's named and which sub-components also exist (e.g. libettercap).

# apt-get search ettercap

[to be continued...]