tomcat unable to start at port 80

[sstan]

Hi guys,
I am having problem of starting tomcat 4.1 using port 80 as non root user on hp 11.11 , everytime started it complain permission denied in the catalina.out file. Had anybody had workaround to start the web server using non root ?

Our server OS is ver 11.11, many thanks in advance.

[Vibhor Kumar Agarwal]

Try changing the permission of the catalina.out file to 777

[Alex Lavrov.]

The problem is not the log file, so probably setting 777 permissions to the log file, will not do the job.

*** The problem is to bind to port less than 1024 as non-root. Only root can bind to these ports ***

Think about some user, that writes some program and then binds to the port 23? Let's say telnet is not used on this server. Now the user can get all the passwords of the users that think that telnet is there.

Alex.

[sstan]

Hi Alex,
you are right , it need to bind to the port 80 which is the well known port reserved for root.

IT had nothing to do with catalina.out file.

Any one had experience on this.?

[Alex Lavrov.]

Again:

*** Only root can bind to these ports ***

Alex.

[rick jones]

So, to be a bit more explicit - if you want to mcat to bind to port 80, it _must_ be root when it tries to do the bind() call. Before/after that point, it does not have to be root, so you might see if Tomcat has a way to "drop" priviledges after setup.

Otherwise, you need to pick another port number.

Now, having said that, there is the possiblity of a _massive_ kludge - you could use ndd to change tcp_smallest_nonpriv_port to say 79 but again, that is a MASSIVE kludge. Far better to find priv dropping support in Tomcat or use another port number.