I am just grinning like hell going through all this.

Even though ArpChat would probably give network admins a heart attack, your mind is most certainly fucking rad, ma'am. =) I too am the kind of person that read books on OSI layers for funsies, lol. Keep playing with code! Reminds me a bit of justine tunney's work with things like https://justine.lol/ape.html where someone just goes way deep on a thing that few people seem to fully understand (in her case it would be "compiler binary format minutiae" among other things) and then asks a crazy question like "what if it were possible to mesh all the binary formats together into a meta-format that actually runs on all of them?" and then conjures up this crazy thing that actually works.

justine tunney is an amazing inspiration! glad you enjoyed :)

The readme banner at the bottom is absolutely hilarious and beautiful. This is neat, great job!

The banner is win :)

Do you expect this to work on Linux?

    # sudo getcap ./arpchat 
      ./arpchat cap_net_raw=ep

I receive "error getting channel, might be missing permissions"

edit: the received error is from arpchat, not any of the setcap setup.

not sure if your formatting is messed up, but these commands should work:

    $ sudo setcap CAP_NET_RAW+ep ./arpchat
    $ ./arpchat

perhaps try sudo on the arpchat binary if not

That was me showing you that setcap had, in fact, been called. That's why it's the output of getcap.

I tried it with sudo and it also failed with the same message.

I've tried it on an arch-based laptop and a debian-based laptop with the same results.

By modifying Cargo.toml slightly, I no longer got the same error, which seems to somehow relate to pnet library.

   pnet = "0.34.0"

Interestingly with Arch it worked fine for me before, but with my Pi, I got the permission error, but changing the pnet ver seemed to fix anyway.

This fixed it for me.

Regarding Arch, I updated everything earlier today but I am running the LTS kernel.

i see. hmmmmm ... that's not supposed to happen, and it works fine on both nixos and ubuntu for me. may be something funky going on, i'll see if i can take a look sometime soon.

Using the prebuilt binary works. Building from source does not.

If you use SELinux, you might want to check /var/log/audit/audit.log