On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 07:28:31AM -0500, James Carlson wrote: > It has nothing to do with privilege or risk. The only question to > answer here (for this issue) is whether fping is useful for ordinary > users. If it's not, then /usr/sbin would be the right answer.
Oh hell yes ping and fping are useful to ordinary users. > As for the privilege check, the reason the code does this is not that > what it's doing requires special privilege (though it does). The > reason is that the utility itself is mostly evil. Most users > generally don't want people scanning subnets at high rates, looking > for hosts to attack. I could start many ping processes and get much the same effect, at higher cost. That would be subject to local resource controls. Perhaps raw socket usage should be as well. > The code has checks on the options to try to stop "mortals" from > abusing the utility, but I think it's a fair question to ask whether > 'we' (collectively) want this at all -- particularly as a bundled part > of the system delivering from SFW. I don't think we want that, but at the very least we could make it an RBAC profile/authorization. > And I'm not sure this is a fast-track. It doesn't seem entirely > obvious or non-controversial to me ... fping is certainly useful. The resource issue is not a big deal IMO. Ideally there'd be resource controls at the raw socket level.
