Fix for ping socket operation not permitted

Just a little while ago I checked my kuma status page and noted that several checks were failing. In troubleshooting, I found that at least the ping command had a problem.

$ ping www.google.com
ping: socket: Operation not permitted

Needless to say, this became rather annoying and off to google I went. I quickly found these two pages that described the problem and a fix for it. While I don’t understand yet how the problem started on my system, I am glad I found a fix.

Verify this is the problem

# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ping_group_range 
1       0
# ping www.google.com
ping: socket: Operation not permitted

First, create a file

$ cd /usr/lib/sysctl.d
$ sudo vi 95-fix-ping-socket.conf

Contents of the new file

net.ipv4.ping_group_range = 0 2147483647

Kick sysctl to pick up the new settings

$ sudo systemctl restart systemd-sysctl

Verify the fix is in place

# cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ping_group_range 
0       2147483647
# ping -4 -c 1 www.google.com
PING www.google.com (142.250.80.100) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from lga34s36-in-f4.1e100.net (142.250.80.100): icmp_seq=1 ttl=118 time=0.901 ms

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.901/0.901/0.901/0.000 ms