I was rereading our excellent forthcoming seaside book :)
*lol*
And lukas wrote
"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. "
And I was wondering what is the exact problem?
Unix blocks port 1 - 1024 for non root users. Running a Smalltalk image as root is obviously a very bad idea, especially when used for web services. Smalltalk is full of security holes (for example Object class>>#readFrom: uses the compiler) that would allow a smart person to gain root rights. It is always good idea to run anything that is publicly reachable in some sort of a sandbox, even if this is just by using a non-privileged user. Cheers, Lukas -- Lukas Renggli http://www.lukas-renggli.ch