How to execute udhcpc as non-root

Question

On a Linux machine, I am trying to run the udhcpc command as non-root. I am getting the error udhcpc: socket: Operation not permitted. Is there any way to execute udhcpc as a simple user in Linux?

Answer 1

A dhcp client needs to bind an ICMP socket, and that requires root permissions¹. You can give a specific user permission to run dhcp through sudo. Run visudo to add a line like this to the configuration (joe is the name of the user to authorize):

joe ALL = (root) /sbin/udhcpc

¹ _{Or the appropriate capability, but they're not widespread yet.}