South Park Streaming.fr Small tricks: Tomcat on port 80 without being root

Sooner or later, all we had the need to run services on ports lower than 1024 with users without permission. To solve it, we can use little tricks:

rinetd allows not only to port forward, but also ip's. The file format is simple: ip port
ip_destino puerto_destino
The major snag is that you have always shown the machine as the source IP, so if tomcat internally redirect 80 to 8080, all connections appear as localhost from a situation quite useless for the logs.


iptables iptables-t nat-A PREROUTING-p tcp - dport 80-i eth0-j REDIRECT - to-port 8080

start-stop-daemon Debian-specific, and perhaps the easiest way if we have or we prepare a script to start services to sysinit.