Equivalent to authbind for centos / amazon linux / rhel

Question

I would like to run node.js TCP server on port 80 on an Amazon EC2 Amazon Linux instance. I added 80 to the security group, but the problem is that node.js binds to port 80, which usually requires root permission.

The simplest solution seems to use authbind, but it is not available from the EC2 yum repository. Is there an equivalent utility for Amazon Linux? Or some other workaround for this distribution? Or is it really a bad idea to use authbind?

Answer 1

This is a bit tedious, but if you install gcc, you can compile it from the source. You can go here to get release 2.1.1. Click the Snapshot link to get the tar.gz file. I could not download it directly using wget (had to load from a web browser and then download), YMMV.

Answer 2

I finished binding to a higher port and then used iptables to redirect port 80 traffic to that port. Another option was to use AWS load balancer from inbound port 80 to the higher port of the ec2 instance.