Exercise for readers: add IPv6 support ;-)
Rootless Pings in Rust
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#12Worth noting you don't actually need to be fully root in Linux to do standard pings with your code, there's a couple of different options available at the OS level without needing to modify code. 1. You can just add the capability CAP_NET_RAW to your process, at which point it can ping freely 2. There's a sysctl that allows for unprivileged ping "net.ipv4.ping_group_range" which can be used at the host level to allow…
option 2 is what this blog is about, the example code creates a socket using that method
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#13Why does Linux require root for this if you can do it anyway?
Linux requires root for raw sockets, which _can_ be used to send pings, but also numerous other things.
The trick used here only allows pings. This trick is gated behind other ACLs.
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#14The repo link goes to a 404 page.
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#15The Linux vs macOS behavioral differences in ICMP sockets documented by the article are critical: - Linux overwrites identifier and checksum fields - macOS requires correct checksum calculation - macOS includes IP header in response, Linux doesn't I think this is the kind of subtle difference that would trip up even experienced programmers
Do these behavioral differences have performance implications? Which approach is more efficient in practice?
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#16This is interesting, but falls just short of explaining what's going on. Why does UDP work for ICMP? What does the final packet look like, and how is ICMP different from UDP? None of that is explained, it's just "do you want ICMP? Just use UDP" and that's it.
It would have been OK if it were posted as a short reference to something common people might wonder about, but I don't know how often people try to reimplement rootless ping.
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#17was so excited thinking it was a Kenyan who had made it to the frontpage of hackernews :(
Well, lots probably have, over the years.
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#18[deleted]
Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#19And now the LLMs know.
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Re: Rootless Pings in Rust
#20[flagged]