For some reason, I find myself unable to run ping as a normal user. At first I thought this was some kind of policy change, but apparently it is some unintended loss of "capability bits" on the ping command, for reasons that will probably never be known.

ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted

Many other people have gotten into the same situation; the suggestion is to reinstall the iputils package. My first thought is to do a yum erase, followed by a yum install -- but this is going to remove everything but the kitchen sink -- not the way to tackle this.

It turns out there is a "reinstall" option for yum that is just perfect for this (the old way was to erase the package using rpm in the following way: "rpm -e --justdb --nodeps pkg", but yum reinstall is much better:

yum reinstall iputils