Starting Kismet

Kismet can be started normally from the command line, and will run in a small ncurses-based wrapper which will show the most recent server output, and a redirect to the web-based interface.

Kismet can also be started as a service; typically in this usage you should also pass --no-ncurses to prevent the ncurses wrapper from loading.

An example systemd script is in the packaging/systemd/ directory of the Kismet source; if you are installing from source this can be copied to /etc/systemd/system/kismet.service, and packages should automatically include this file.

When starting Kismet via systemd, you should install kismet as suidroot, and use systemctl edit kismet.service to set the following:

[Service]
User=your-unprivileged-user
Group=kismet