@MohammadAG: Oh, didn't know that really. I saw that that command exists now, but ok, good to know. What's the reason? Shouldn't that be the safe way with the file locking and all that?

True, the Right Way(TM) to do it is via /etc/sudoers.d and update-sudoers, sorry for giving bad advice.

BTW the warnings on the wiki seem a bit bogus to me - the real reason for not using visudo is that your changes will be lost the next time update-sudoers runs. If order can break things, this can happen just as easily with an unfortunately named /etc/sudoers.d file.

Ok, honestly grateful for the safety advice and all! But still, it vexes me that I have not yet found out how to ping as 'user' without having to use sudo.
It should be possible to do right?

Not with the built-in ping. The problem is that it's really just a symlink to busybox, and if you make that suid root that will apply to all busybox applets which is almost certainly not what you want.

There are a number of other packages that provide alternatives you can try. Note that the "ping" package isn't installed suid either (but you could chmod it without any problems).

@lma: Thanks, I had totally missed that ping was part of the busybox too...darned, I should have checked. I just assumed that it was separated. And your are of course right, I would never want to make all the busybox stuff being accessible to any user. Great that you pointed that out because it totally went by me.
Guess I'll try one of the external ones then. Kinda hard to know though what ping that would be the best...to many to choose from.

But ok, back to the issue at hand: If the ping I choose to install is root only, wouldn't I better then add that one in a sudoers script instead of chmod'in the binary?

"sudo ping" and "rootsh ping" both work for me (using rootsh 1.5). I'd like to be able to do it as user though.

Noob question what is ping and how can it better my life?

Add:

to /home/user/.profile

@Jigzy: It's a little bit like the submarine movie "Hunt for Red October", but geek version. Say you want to know whether a computer on the net is "alive" and responds, you then send a little ping to it. Its in fact a small designated packet of a few bytes (at a minimum 40). If the pinged computer receives the packet it responds with a 'pong' packet as quickly as possible. However, not all computers (or routers for that matter) respond to ping due to security reasons. It is something that each computer desides whether to allow.
Ping is also a way to find out the responsiveness of a different computer on the net. The longer time it takes to receive the ping, it is likely that it will take time to communicate with it in any other way.

@GameboyRMH: I installed 'fping' went root and I chmod'ed the binary (/usr/local/sbin/fping) with 4755.
That works, I would however have preferred to do this with sudoers since I guess that's the right way.

@kureyon: Yes, that of course! It works also and thanks. But I was a little into having this working with sudoers.