John R Pierce wrote:
I am using open source Alfresco( alfresco.com ), written in java, which has own code for FTP, CIFS (running on tomcat apache and java). I need to run tomcat5 as root in order to achieve that alfresco will bind ftp cifs on privileged ports (21 , 135 ...).
I am wondering, it is possible to allow user to bind on some privilleged port. Like having whole alfresco running under user alfresco and not root and able to bind on privileged ports?
the way thats conventionally done is by having a small SUID program (with the S bit set) which is invoked from the main program and opens the privileged socket, then hands it back to the unprivileged rest of the program. I have no idea how you'd do this with java short of using native code interfaces.
that seems like a huge and very complex system, running that whole thing as root would be a nightmare from a security audit perspective.
Another approach that may or may not work with Alfresco is to configure the application to use high-numbered ports instead of the standard ones, then use iptables to redirect connections to the standard port numbers to the ones where the application runs.