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Release your inner geek

Ping not permitted in WSL

Posted on 11 June 2020 by Kasper Lund

Using Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) is so nice, when you are forced to work from an inferior OS, sometimes also referred to as “a gaming console”
Especially combined with the Windows Terminal, which I wrote about here: https://www.nordal-lund.dk/?p=592 I’m sure that most Linux/Unix administrators will feel right at home.

Despite all the goodness, there are some minor annoyances preventing me from experiencing a big burst of happiness. One of them are the inability to use ping on a std. WSL Debian as a non-root user. That’s right, you need to do “sudo ping nice.little.address” or you will be denied 🙁

The root cause is the ping utility missing the SUID bit, which it has on the real distro. Luckily there’s an easy fix, add the SUID bit to the ping utility:

sudo chmod u+s /bin/ping

Thats it, now you can ping without sudo again 🙂

Happy pinging
/Kasper

Test network connection with powershell

Posted on 29 January 2018 by Kasper Lund

Sometimes you need to test the network connection for a range of IP addresses. Normally I would use ping from a commandline, but it could be a hugh task to test more than 20-30 addresses.
Utilizing a bit of powershell and the test-connection command will help us overcome the task in an easy way:

[code language=”powershell”]1..100 | %{write-host -nonewline "Testing 10.0.0.$_ : "; Test-Connection 10.0.0.$_ -quiet -Count 1}[/code]

The above one-liner will test the connection to all hosts in a range from 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.100 and giva a False or True status.
Remember that % is a short way of using the foreach loop, so you could use “foreach” instead of %.