Hi I know that this might sound like a stupid question, but its one that has been bugging me.
Why does UNIX continue to give root access to all deamons below port 1024? I know that UNIX does it so that normal users can't seem like legit and important services, but there surely must be some better way of delegating a port below 1024 to a deamon. A while ago, I remember reading on slashdot about how TrustedBSD and OpenBSD were different from each other. One of the differences was the fact that TrustedBSD used ACLs to give acccess to whatever for whomever. Couldn't you essentially do the same for ports? (Instead of giving access to files, you would give acces to ports) It would be like having a file called /etc/acl.ports (or something) and within the file, would be a list which binaries are allowed to bind to what ports. (an example is provided below) # /etc/acl.ports # Port Numbers binary 80 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd 22 /usr/local/openssh/sshd 21 /usr/local/anonftpd/ftpd This way, not only would root have control over all ports below 1024, but the deamons themselves don't need to be running as root. (I also think that it would be very odd for a deamon _needing_ root access to run in the first place ...) Thanks for hearing me out. I could be very wrong on all of this. (Sorry if I am) I would just like to know why this hasn't been implemented in UNIX. (Actually, I did once hear about some patch to the LInux kernel that did something similar, but I have yet to find the patch) Sunny Dubey <insert funny-witty comment here>
