To make a long story short:

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ sudo chmod 4755 /bin/ping

And now for the long story:

After the initial setup of my ASUS Tinkerboard and adding it to my local network by using an attached monitor, keyboard and mouse I managed to get it onto my local network so I could SSH into it and remove the monitor etc. from the setup again (btw. the default username/password combination is linaro/linaro).

Using the ping command (after I had SSH’ed into the tinkerboard) gave me the following error:

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ ping google.com
ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted

Checking the permission bits of the ping command

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ ls -al /bin/ping
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 34752 Nov  8  2014 /bin/ping

showed that it just had normal execution rights, this could be easily fixed with:

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ sudo chmod 4755 /bin/ping

After this command the execution rights were fixed and it was possible to use the ping command:

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ ls -al /bin/ping
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 34752 Nov 8 2014 /bin/ping
linaro@linaro-alip:~$ ping google.com
PING google.com (216.58.201.174) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from arn02s06-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.201.174): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=33.7 ms
64 bytes from arn02s06-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.201.174): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=34.0 ms
64 bytes from arn02s06-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.201.174): icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=33.9 ms
64 bytes from arn02s06-in-f14.1e100.net (216.58.201.174): icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=33.8 ms
^C
--- google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 33.748/33.920/34.058/0.174 ms
linaro@linaro-alip:~$

I don’t know if it was this or some other issue, but this change also seems to have fixed the issues I had with running “sudo apt update”.