Re: traceroute in /usr/bin, not /usr/sbin

[Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk>]

Wouter Verhelst writes:

> Saying that an ordinary user cannot run a program in [/usr]/sbin is
> simply incorrect. He can. The question is what he'd be doing when he
> runs a program from /sbin. When running ifconfig, he'd be doing
> system administration tasks (why else would you need the IP address
> *when you're already logged on to that machine*?)

It seems perfectly plausible to me that a non-administrator might want
to run ifconfig.  They may not know what the local addresses are via
any other mechanism; they may want to know the broadcast addresses of
attached networks; they may want to know the MAC address of this
machine for purposes of debugging some otherwise unrelated network
problem.

However, I thought the argument was "get traceroute in the right
place", not "get traceroute in the right place and definitely don't
change anything else at all".

ttfn/rjk