Tuomas Kulve wrote: > hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote: > >> That's bizarre. What security implications are there in ping that would >> mean it has to be run only by root? Forcing people to use root when not >> necessary is itself a security problem. > > Ping seems to be setuid root on my debian. So it's run as root here too. That's because 'debianite' is an anagram of 'anal-retentive' (well, it's not, but it ought to be :-) A Debian contributor once told me that all utilities which access the network should be root-privileged because otherwise they would allow ordinary users to know of (or detect) the existence of other machines, which might be a security breach. ///Peter
