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IdPLinuxNonRootDebianUbuntu

The Shibboleth V2 IdP and SP software have reached End of Life and are no longer supported. This documentation is available for historical purposes only. See the IDP v4 and SP v3 wiki spaces for current documentation on the supported versions.

IdPLinuxNonRootDebianUbuntu

Sept 18, 2015

Configuring Debian or Ubuntu To Run a Servlet Container as Non-Root

Tomcat 6, 7, 8

For recent releases of Debian and Ubuntu the tomcat<n> package includes a dependency on the authbind package and a default authbind configuration that allows the Tomcat container to bind to ports < 1024 without running the whole JVM as root user.

To leverage the authbind configuration edit the configuration file /etc/default/tomcat<n> and set (at the very end)

AUTHBIND=yes

See this Debian Administrator article or check the man page for authbind.

For example binding to port 443 one would need:

touch /etc/authbind/byport/443 chmod 0755 /etc/authbind/byport/443 chown tomcat8:tomcat8 /etc/authbind/byport/443 # or tomcat<n>:tomcat<n> for your version