What exactly is so risky about giving root to the only app that ever runs on the system? Everyone talks about viruses but how can a machine get a virus if it is just used to run pings. Plus if it got infected I would just format the HDD and reload it. There is nothing of value on the system. I understand the risk of a zombie (I work at an ISP) but since this machine is on a private network and firewalled bigtime the damage would be very limited if any at all. I suppose it could try to DOS some routers (it pings routers) but it lacks Internet access as it is on our admin network. Really though I do not care if it has root, I just need to know what buttons I press to allow the program to ping things. I suppose I could load a windows VM but that kinda defeats the purpose of having linux on the system in first place.
