Nmap

Does nmap have to be run as root??

Can I run nmap from a normal user account, and does it lose functionality if not run as root?

You can run nmap from a normal user account, but it does lose functionality if not run as root.

For a normal portscan it'll due with a normal user account but if you want to do a scan with full functionality then I'll recomend you to be login as root. Or create and give a "scan-user" enough rights to do a full scan.

I can't help you with the rights though. But I have used sudo to run nmap as root and it did work for me.

Some basic stuff can be done as `joe user', but all of the nifty stuff requires root privi's.

This is of course a politicaly correct feature found on many Unix security tools.

Doing an 'su' before the scan ought to be good enough.

I suppose it could be hacked on to change permissions levels before compiling, if you wanted to do that.

OK, thanks. I'll just run it as root then.