then lukas what you wrote in the book does not describe the correct problem. Because when I read I thought it was a problem of the Smalltalk VM "To listen on port 80, the standard port used by the HTTP protocol, the web server needs to run as root. Running a public service as root is a huge security issue. Dedicated web servers such as Apache drop their root privileges after startup. This allows them to listen to port 80 while not being root. Unfortunately this is not something that can be easily done from within the Smalltalk VM. " You write "Dedicated web servers such as Apache drop their root privileges after startup." So I was wondering why a SMalltalk VM cannot do the same? Stef On Dec 2, 2008, at 10:30 PM, Lukas Renggli wrote:
my question was more how can the VM be fixed :)
That's not a VM issue. It's not even a Smalltalk issue. It is just common sense to not run anything reachable in public as root. There is nothing to be fixed. As a developer you usually want to be able to freely interact with the rest of the world (FFI, Aliens, OSProcess, etc), but keep the risk of a system break-in as low as possible.
Also see the recent discussion in the Squeak mailing-list about that: <http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2008-November/132679....
.
Lukas
-- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch
_______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project