pump wants me to be root to execute: pump -i eth0 --status I think pump should allow you to query the interface status as normal user, as the info it outputs are not secrets.
While doing this would be a nice touch, it would require a setuid pump binary, which we don't feel is worthwhile. If sysadmins care to publish this information for their users, pump 0.7.8 supports a "script" which makes this easy for them to do on a per-machine basis.