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Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 12:52:44 +0200
From: Gareth de Vaux <bsd@lordcow.org>
To: Dino Vliet <dino_vliet@yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20120104105244.GA6157@lordcow.org>
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Cc: "ports@FreeBSD.org" <ports@freebsd.org>,
	"freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: best way to bind webserver to port 80 without running as root
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On Wed 2012-01-04 (02:10), Dino Vliet wrote:
> suddenly I'm facing this quest on freebsd 8. I need to bind my little webserver running aolserver to port 80. In the past I was always using port 8080 and had my router configured to forward requests on port 80 to the server on port 8080. However, I am planning to host my little site on a virtual server with a hosting company and figuredI can't use the workaround I always used. So my question is, how to bind aolserver to port 80 without running?as root as I understood ports below 1024 can only be used by root.
> I found a sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh which enables me to set it to 0. However, I don't know what the security ramifications are of using that. Are there any other options I could consider?

Hi, if your server isn't able to bind as root and then drop its ownership
then you can just run the process on a higher port number and use something
like pf or portfwd to forward requests to port 80 to that higher port.