It's very annoying to have this limitation on my development box, when there won't ever be any users other than me.
I'm aware of the standard workarounds, but none of them do exactly what I want:
Is there some simple sysctl
variable to allow non-root processes to bind to "privileged" ports (ports less than 1024) on Linux, or am I just out of luck?
EDIT: In some cases, you can use capabilities to do this.
Okay, thanks to the people who pointed out the capabilities system and CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
capability. If you have a recent kernel, it is indeed possible to use this to start a service as non-root but bind low ports. The short answer is that you do:
setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /path/to/program
And then anytime program
is executed thereafter it will have the CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE
capability. setcap
is in the debian package libcap2-bin
.
Now for the caveats:
program
that has elevated privileges like setcap
or suid
. So if your program
uses its own .../lib/
, you might have to look into another option like port forwarding.Resources:
setcap
.Note: RHEL first added this in v6.