pinging without root privileges

From: Jo (JoJoTwilligo_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 06/03/04 

Date: 3 Jun 2004 14:55:04 -0700

How does one tests for the existence of another host, without being
root, and without resorting to system calls, like ping? After a full
day's work, I've still not been able to get a rudimentary ping routine
going. After all this research I've long understood that ICMP is not
feasible, since I want to be able to do this w/out root privileges, so
I've been looking for a reasonable alternative. I've not found one.
The closest thing I found was a promise about sending UDP packets to
an unbound port, and looking for a port unreachable message. This
doesn't make any sense to me, since I thought the only important
weakness of UDP is that the sender has no way of knowing what happened
to its packets.
   The network I'll be testing is a LAN, so there is a certain amount
of control on the configuration of the hosts, but I'd rather not rely
too heavily on specific configurations, and test for properties that
appear on most systems. Trying the echo port comes to mind, but I also
heard that they are usually closed.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: pinging without root privileges
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  • Re: pinging without root privileges
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