Save and Run Preferences
- Close Wireshark on both sides and restart it for changes to take effect. (This program does not support Auto-Restart.) After Wireshark restarts, open the preferences file with a text editor such as Notepad++ or TextEdit.
- Look for the line with “protobuf search paths”. Add a new line below it and copy and paste this text:
protobuf search paths = ./wiretap;C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\MyProtoshare - Save your preference file then restart Wireshark. Wireshark should now be able to find the location of the protobuf files it needs.
What are Protobuf Search Paths in Wireshark?
Protocol Buffers define how the local and remote Wireshark processes should interact with each other. The protocol buffer chatty layer allows you to configure a proxy server and have Wireshark talk to it, which could be on your own machine or on a different one. This is sometimes useful for debugging, but there are processors in data centers that are running Wireshark as well.
In those cases, you can use the protobuf search paths value to tell them where to find the protocol buffers files they need in order to communicate with each other. If you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue with Wireshark saving data from a customer’s node application (e.g., Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, etc.).