Fonts are missing when using WebShark offline

[CodeCommandoPants]

When using webshark without being connected to a network (inside closed network for malware analysis for example) the ui cannot load fonts and icons.

• Font: Roboto
• Font: Material Icons

This could be fixed by:

• Hosting the fonts locally on the webserver and fetching them from the internet at the same time as the docker image is built. That way the image can be moved into the offline network and serve the fonts.
• Baking in backup icons as SVG as a fallback or use unicode icons as fallback.

[lmangani]

You're right - we should not rely on connectivity for any required components and should bundle them into builds.

[CodeCommandoPants]

Ideally it would be good to also have a way to run and install webshark without using docker too.
Trying to build the docker image offline is not straight forward either.

I tried patching the Dockerfile to download the repo data for wireshark and node-webshark as files from a web mirror rather than relying on git.

It was not directly apparent that qxip/node-webshark has a redirect to qxip/webshark but is saved as the legacy name node-webshark.

Later the webshark-ui dep is downloaded as a release which is yet another thing you manually have to patch and mirror.

I can think of the follow ways this can be made more streamlined:

• Uploading webshark as release with everything bundled in the zip file.
• Placing the git repo for qxip/webshark-ui and wireshark/wireshark nested inside qxip/webshark so that only a single clone is needed to be ready to build the application.

Also building is currently broken and needs the patch in this PR to work.
#49

I also experienced this bug:
#48

Do not get disgruntled by my criticism, the software is very good!

[lmangani]

Do not get disgruntled by my criticism, the software is very good!

No worries at all, we appreciate it - this is a bundle-hack we've been trying to keep alive for a long time and its just showing its age with each layer. We have a dev version entirely based on WASM but it still lacks so many features compared to tshark/sharkd hopefully one day we'll catch up and release a proper stand-alone, replicable webshark.