When running the netsat command as a non-root user

Question

I get the following error:
test@testserver1# netstat -i
ip open: Permission denied
can't open mib stream: Bad file number
test@testserver1# which netstat
/bin/netstat
test@testserver1# ls -al /bin/netstat
-r-xr-sr-x 1 root sys 55180 Jan 6 2004 /bin/netstat
test@testserver1#
test@testserver1# ls -ald /bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Nov 9 2002 /bin -> ./usr/bin
test@testserver1#
test@testserver1# ls -ald /usr
drwxr-xr-x 40 root sys 1024 Nov 21 09:45 /usr
test@testserver1# ls -ald /usr/bin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root bin 9216 Oct 2 23:53 /usr/bin
test@testserver101#
Support Team

Answer 1

You don't say what OS, but in Solaris 8 make sure:
ls -l /devices/pseudo/ip@0:ip
crw-rw---- 1 root sys 3, 0 May 3 2006 /devices/pseudo/ip@0:ip
And in 10:
$ ls -l /devices/pseudo/ip@0:ip
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 3, 0 Jan 10 14:31 /devices/pseudo/ip@0:ip
It's worth learning truss or dtrace, you can debug file open failures like this quite easily and quickly.