I don't think I would feel comfortable giving anyone this kind of access to any of the computers I use for anything personal/private.
However, I wouldn't feel nearly as uncomfortable if this were on a separate machine that's just hanging off my network. But, I don't know as I'd want to set up an entire separate desktop machine just so you could do ping probes from it. So, I'm not sure if you have any sort of budget for this, but you may want to consider building some ultra-cheap linux boxes that you can hand out to people. I suspect you would have much better luck asking if anyone would mind hanging your box off their network than asking if they would mind giving you shell access and an suid binary on their machine. Given your very minimal technical requirements, you could probably pick up some obsolete PCs on EBay for virtually nothing that would work just fine. Old thin client machines for terminal servers would probably be perfect for this, since they are usually small and silent, have very little power draw, and have a solid-state hard drive. There are about 60 of these on EBay right now going for between $.99 and $25 (although, the shipping price listed for some of these is pretty ridiculous). You might even be able to pick up a bunch from some surplus vendor (terp trader, maybe?) for next to nothing. -Paul On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 10:27:25AM -0400, Randolph Baden wrote: > I'm not quite sure if this is appropriate for this list or not, but I > figure I'll give it a try anyway. Most importantly, I need to find > Linux users in the area, and this list is one of the few places I know > of doing so. > > > I'm a Ph.D. student in networking here at UMD, and I've hit a little > snag in my research. I'll be really up front about this, I'm going to > be asking for a lot here, and I feel a little rude for doing so, but I > thought I'd at least try it. In particular, I'm looking for Comcast > users in the area willing to do the following: > > 1) Help me with IP geolocation research; that is, finding the latitude > and longitude of a machine given its IP address. I understand that > not everyone would support such research due to privacy concerns. > 2) Give me SSH access to their Linux machine on the Comcast network > (to my own user account, obviously). > 3) Set up dynamic DNS (if you don't already have it) so that I can > continue to log in to your computer even after Comcast changes its IP. > 4) Allow me to compile and use a modified version of ping, which sends > ping probes according to a very specific schedule to a set of hosts > (the schedule and hosts are defined by another file; unless I'm just > testing it to make sure it's working, this will always be a list of > other machines nearby in the Comcast network). Since ping (and this > modified program, pink) requires raw sockets, it must be run as root. > I'm not asking for root access, I'm just asking that you change the > owner on the program to root and set the sticky bit, after I've > compiled it. I'm sure people will scream about how unsafe this is, > and I understand that; the only things I can offer are my assurances > that I'm not trying to do anything malicious and the source code to > the program. > 5) Allow me to use the program to send a small amount of ICMP probes. > Unless I seriously make a mistake in the script file, you probably > won't even notice that I'm sending anything unless you look really > hard (no more than 1000 56 byte pings in a 5 minute period, probably > for at most 10-15 minutes a day, probably only one day a week). I'm > not sure exactly how long I will want to continue using the probes > yet, but of course you're free to opt out at any time. > > The following two are optional, but appreciated: > > 6) Use Google Maps to find the latitude and longitude of your home. > 7) Set up your router to respond to pings. > > > I wish that I were more to you all than some random stranger, because > this is a lot to ask. As it is, I'm really not expecting anyone on > this list to be willing to do those things (unless maybe they do know > me and I haven't asked them already!), but I thought I'd ask anyway. > :) Anyone who's still interested, respond to me directly off of the > list; anyone who wants to discuss how bad of an idea this is can feel > free to do so on the list. Unfortunately, the only compensation I can > offer is an acknowledgment in any papers I publish based on the > experiments I would run here! > > -Randy Baden >
