ping with python?

[Christian Tismer]

Rupert Kolb wrote:
> Jeff Bauer wrote:
> 
>>> This page http://www.python.org/~jeremy/python.html has
>>> an implementation of ping.
>>
>>
>>
>> In addition to Jeremy's code, Matthew Cowles has also
>> written a Python implementation of ping:
>>
>>   http://www.visi.com/~mdc/pythonstuff.html
> 
> 
> Thanks for the links.
> 
> Now I have the problem, that both implementations need root permissions 
> to execute it under unix.
> (I tried the Net::Ping. There I do not have to be root, to execute a 
> ping. And I found no SUID program in the perl installation directory.)

The icmp protocol cannot be used without
root priviledges. See ping for example:

tismer at tismer:~$ ls -la $(which ping)
-rwsr-xr-x    1 root     root        15244 Nov 18  2001 /bin/ping
tismer at tismer:~$

It has the sticky bit set.
The Perl package uses the UDP protocol by default
and doesn't need root access. See

http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/lib/Net/Ping.html

Maybe you could verify that it really doesn't
work without root when specifying the ICMP protocol.

Unfortunately I have no idea how the Python
ping implementations must be changed to support UDP.
I could install and read Net::Ping, but I don't like to.

ciao - chris

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