Re: Why /usr/sbin is not in my root $PATH ?
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.
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