Being a software developer, it’s easy to recognize the importance of having a great environment to work in. Most of the time I spend tends to be 80% or more on thought and the rest of the time translating those thoughts into actual code. I have politely explained this process by making the analogy of building a house of cards.

When you’re working on software (and other thought-provoking tasks) you invest time to work toward a point where you have to translate your thoughts or “purge” them into code or words. If you are interrupted during that crucial phase where you’re building your house of cards, there’s a good chance that part or all of your house will fall down. At that point you can sometimes quickly pick up where you left off if only a few cards were lost. Other times you have to file a complete loss with the “house of cards” insurance adjuster and rebuild from the foundation up.

This is a very brief outline of how to run the Apache Tomcat servlet container on port 80 (the standard web server port) on a Linux operating system. The steps illustrated here are specific to Tomcat but similar steps can be implemented for other servlet containers.

The issue is that the linux kernel has a security precaution built in to the kernel to only allow the root user to bind to a port under 1024. Since it’s a bad idea to run a network server as root, most startup scripts bind to the initial listening socket, then drop down to a non-privileged user. Since Tomcat is written in Java, it does not have the ability to switch users like this.

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