Re: These 'roots' are bugging me.

[Tim Haynes <debian@stirfried.vegetable.org.uk>]

Steve Mickeler <steve@neptune.on.ca> writes:

> Its neither a debian or linux problem.
>
> ports below 1024 are priviledged ports which can only be bound to by the
> super user.
>
> just like apache starts as root, but then spawns child processes as a non
> root user, the same thing is done with bind when started with the -u and
> -g options.

It's a linux feature that you can get kernel patches to permit various
processes / users to bind to various low ports. Otherwise, you don't need
to be root, you need the relevant Capability in the kernel.

~Tim
-- 
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