It should be possible to make ping work as normal user with recent
linux: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/5/13/382
However, it appears that it requires relatively intrusive changes in the
ping utility. Its not just opening the socket as SOCK_DGRAM and think
everything is ok (like it appears to work on OSX)
Busybox tried to add support for it:
http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/networking/ping.c?id=72745632a13ccd12232127b31e1656f2f7ebcaff
But later reverted it:
http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/networking/ping.c?id=f0058b1b1fe9f7e69b415616096fb9347f599426
The patch for the normal ping utility is also relatively intrusive:
http://openwall.info/wiki/_media/segoon/iputils-ss020927-pingsock.diff
I could also not find anything that indicates that this works for ipv6
in kernel. There are no /proc/sys/net/ipv6/ping_group_range
So it looks like we need to set suid root for now.