From: Florian Forster <octo@leeloo.lan.home.verplant.org>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:24:59 +0000 (+0100)
Subject: README: Document Linux capabilities and UNIX set-UID root solutions.
X-Git-Tag: liboping-1.6.0~4
X-Git-Url: https://git.tokkee.org/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=39e7b8784d4a9928e6fc153ceda0bce3d9444eed;p=liboping.git

README: Document Linux capabilities and UNIX set-UID root solutions.
---

diff --git a/README b/README
index 52711b3..bf8c2bf 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -35,6 +35,41 @@ Perl bindings
   “--without-perl-bindings”.
 
 
+Permissions
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+  On UNIX, special permissions are required to open raw sockets (raw(7)). If
+  you compile and install the “oping” and “noping” binaries as normal user
+  (which is strongly suggested), you won't be able to use the binaries as a
+  normal user, because you won't have the permission to open raw sockets.
+
+  Linux
+  ━━━━━
+  On Linux, the preferred method is to assign the required “capability” to the
+  binaries. This will allow the binary to open raw sockets, but doesn't give
+  any other permissions such as reading other users' files or shutting down the
+  system. The downside is that this mechanism is comparatively new: Assigning
+  capabilities to files is available since Linux 2.6.24.
+
+  To set the required capabilities, run (as user root):
+
+    # setcap cap_net_raw=ep /opt/oping/bin/oping
+    # setcap cap_net_raw=ep /opt/oping/bin/noping
+
+  Other UNIX
+  ━━━━━━━━━━
+  Capabilities are a nice but Linux-specific solution. To make “oping” and
+  “noping” available to unprivileged users on other UNIX systems, use the
+  traditional set-UID root solution. If your system supports “saved set-UIDs”
+  (basically all systems do), the applications will drop the privileges during
+  initialization and only regain them when actually opening the socket(s).
+  
+  To set the set-UID bit, run (as user root):
+
+    # chown root: /opt/oping/bin/{,n}oping
+    # chmod u+s   /opt/oping/bin/{,n}oping
+
+
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