I use netselect version 0.2 already for quite some time on my suse systems and
I'm happy with it.  As such I adviced suse to have netselect included.  Suse
is not just picking up the package as netselect can run by root only, or has
this changed since version 0.2?

Suse is reluctant to include netselect, as they have a traceroute version that
can be run by ordinary users and for this reason they expect netselect to be
able to run by ordinary users as well.  Perhaps can you have a look at suse's
traceroute implementation to make netselect capable to be run by ordinary
users too?

The suse traceroute src rpm can be found at:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/9.2-i386/SRPMS.base/net-tools-1.60-551.src.rpm



On Sun, Feb 27, 2005 at 09:44:46PM +0100, Richard Bos wrote:
[snip]
that
suse's

thanks for your suggestion, I'll give suse's traceroute a look and see it I
can change the relevant code for netselect!



filippo

I agree. I don't see why netselect has to be run as root. I hadn't run
it in a couple of years and was surprised to see that you had to run it
as root. I don't recall that you used to have to so going back in
history might be helpful too.

Thanks!

I believe the reason netslect needs to run as root is due to the fact
that it uses raw sockets (sends an UDP probe, waits for an ICMP
reply). That is a capability reserved for the root user (or a user
with the CAP_NET_RAW capability).

Netselect could run as a regular-user in GNU/Linux systems if granted
that capability (a good walkthrough on how to this is
http://www.friedhoff.org/posixfilecapsold.html). Just run:

sudo chmod 711 /usr/bin/netselect
sudo setcap cap_net_raw=ep/ usr/bin/netselect



Regards

Javier