This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: how to suid a perl script From: "Steve \"Stevers!\" Coile" <scoile@redhat.com> Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 17:06:58 -0400 (EDT) On Mon, 24 May 1999, Clarence Donath wrote: >Having tried this exercise recently myself, I finally concluded that you >need to be logged in as root in order to ping using icmp. I believe that >if you try pinging using the 'tcp' protocol that it will work for you. Pinging via TCP isn't really pinging (technically). However, using TCP to test connectivity is sometimes more reliable than using ICMP, since some sites filter ICMP echo requests ("pings") at the router to prevent ping floods. On the other hand, the TCP "ping" used by the Perl module (which module was it?) tries to connect to a trivial service typically provided via Inetd, such as "echo" or "chargen". Many sites disable these trivial services because: (a) they're very seldom used by any applications; (b) mostly only used for diagnostic purposes anyway, but better utilities exist; and (c) can easily be used in denial-of-service attacks. ===