On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 11:36:44AM -0700, ghe wrote: > On 2/21/19 11:18 AM, Reco wrote: > > > Ping *always* required root, > > Maybe, but I didn't know that. I've been on Debian since the days of the > major Toy Story characters, and I've always just typed 'ping' and it punged. > > But thanks, somebodyAtDebian, for correcting my decades old expectation.
You might be confused here. The ping program is intended to *work* for all users, but in order to work, it needs a special capability. Traditionally the ping program acquired this capability by being installed with the setuid bit. In more recent releases of Debian, /bin/ping is no longer setuid, and instead uses the Linux capabilities feature for its special power-up. <http://unixetc.co.uk/2016/05/30/linux-capabilities-and-ping/> is the first link I found which explains this. Seems like the right level of exposition for this thread. It's possible that somehow you removed your /bin/ping and restored it from a backup, but you didn't re-run the thing that gives it the special capabilities it needs. Or, who knows, maybe something else happened.