Acces Apache Tomcat on port 80 or 443 from Linux

Default Linux security rules don't allow to access network ports < 1024 to non rooted processes. A bad idea would be to start your Tomcat as ROOT. Very bad idea!!! But these's another solution. You can start your Tomcat with a port > 1024 and then redirect requests from standard ports (such as HTTP/80  or HTPS/443) to ports > 1024.

Let's imagine you bound Tomcat https connector to 8301. We'll add a rule to iptables like this :

Prequisites : switch to root (su -)

iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth1 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8301
/etc/init.d/iptables save
/etc/init.d/iptables restart

Then, just check if rule is active with iptables -L

target     prot opt source               destination         
ACCEPT     tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere            tcp dpt:https 

Now, you can access your tomcat threw a classic https url :)