Ubuntu + Jetty: Permission required for service using port above 1024?

Question

I am trying to run jetty as a service on ubuntu 16.04 on port 8010. It fails with a SocketException: Permission denied.

As far as I know ports above 1024 are free to use, so I'm wondering why I get this error and how to fix it. I had tried port 8080 before, that gave the same error and another one: java.net.BindException: Address already in use: bind. Thats why I changed it to port 8010 which is not in use.

I know ports <1024 need root access, but as far as I know ports above 1024 should be allowed to use without that. So how do I grant my service the right to bind on the port?

This is an extract from the jetty log:

2017-09-28 06:24:57.287:INFO:oejs.AbstractConnector:main: Started ServerConnector@48b22fd4{HTTP/1.1,[http/1.1]}{0.0.0.0:8010}
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:498)
at org.eclipse.jetty.start.Main.invokeMain(Main.java:215)
at org.eclipse.jetty.start.Main.start(Main.java:458)
at org.eclipse.jetty.start.Main.main(Main.java:76)

Caused by: java.net.SocketException: Keine Berechtigung
  at sun.nio.ch.Net.bind0(Native Method)
  at sun.nio.ch.Net.bind(Net.java:433)
  at sun.nio.ch.Net.bind(Net.java:425)
  at sun.nio.ch.ServerSocketChannelImpl.bind(ServerSocketChannelImpl.java:223)

Answer 1

It turned out that jetty was trying to bind to 2 ports: 8010 and 443, although in the log it only showed 8010 with the error.

Changing the the ssl port to something above 1024 solved the issue.

I had tried to give the service full root access, but that still did not allow the service to run on a port below 1024.