ping to broadcast address: permission denied?

Paul Slootman (paul@wau.mis.ah.nl)
Fri, 7 Mar 1997 13:02:25 +0100 (MET)

Niemi@linux.wauug.org wrote:
>
>I have fetched, compiled, and made available Trygve Gudmundsen's
>Linux-modified version of Eric Wassenaar's excellent "ping" program. It is
>all sitting on on wauug.erols.com in "/pub/net/wassenaar-ping". As Trygve
>mentioned his site was about to be down for 5 days I figured this could be
>a useful service 8^)

I've picked up this version, compiled it, but it still doesn't
do what I'd hoped (I had already expected it wasn't a ping code
problem).

The problem is this:

I'm on a subnetted B-class network (141.93.34.0, netmask 255.255.255.0).
This all works fine, however I cannot ping the broadcast address (which
is 141.93.34.255). Ping says:

# ./ping 141.93.34.255
PING 141.93.34.255: 56 data bytes
sendto: Permission denied
no reply from 141.93.34.255 within 1 sec
sendto: Permission denied

---- 141.93.34.255 PING Statistics ----
2 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

This works perfectly from a Solaris 2.5 system on the same network...
I tried tracing this into the kernel, but at a certain point I get
lost. It's definitely sendto() that returns -1 EACCES, according to
strace.

Same thing when pinging the loopback broadcast address 127.255.255.255,
so it doesn't look like it's a subnetting problem.

Anyone know what the problem is? Even better, what the solution is?
Vanilla 2.0.29.

Paul Slootman

--
Murphy Software, Enschede, The Netherlands | Support Randal Schwartz!
work: paul@wau.mis.ah.nl / paul@murphy.nl  | Email fund@stonehenge.com
home: paul@wurtel.demon.nl                 | for info.