Wednesday, March 06, 2013

Installing Wireshark / WinPCap on Windows 8

One of side-effects of security "improvements" of Windows 8 (and Server 2012)
is that network testing tools like WinPCap can not be installed in "native Windows 8" mode.
In case of upgrade from Windows 7, you need to uninstall WinPCap first.
Since a popular network tool Wireshark depends on WinPCap, that is a problem.

The solution is quite simple: install in "Windows 7 compatibility + Administrator" mode.
(Right mouse button click on install file => Properties => Compatibility)
But there is a trick: WinPCap needs to be installed first in compatibility mode,
and then Wireshark the same but just skip installing WinPCap that is part of Wireshark install.

The reason is that "compatibility" works only on the original install file,
not for other installs (processes) started from there.

MSDN Blogs

No comments: