Short answer: you can't. Ports below 1024 can be opened only by root. As per comment - well, you can, using CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, but that approach, applied to java bin will make any java program to be run with this setting, which is undesirable, if not a security risk.
The long answer: you can redirect connections on port 80 to some other port you can open as normal user.
Run as root:
# iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
As loopback devices (like localhost) do not use the prerouting rules, if you need to use localhost, etc., add this rule as well (thanks @Francesco):
# iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -d 127.0.0.1 --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080
NOTE: The above solution is not well suited for multi-user systems, as any user can open port 8080 (or any other high port you decide to use), thus intercepting the traffic. (Credits to CesarB).
EDIT: as per comment question - to delete the above rule:
# iptables -t nat --line-numbers -n -L
This will output something like:
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
num target prot opt source destination
1 REDIRECT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:8080 redir ports 8088
2 REDIRECT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:80 redir ports 8080
The rule you are interested in is nr. 2, so to delete it:
# iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING 2
Best Answer
Use cgroups together with CFQ I/O scheduler (the default for many distributions). CFQ is aware of cgroups and can give any user, group or process only x% of disk I/O time.
So, if you have one cgroup called
sequenceGeek, having 90% of maximum resources, you can then have another cgroup calledcoworkers, having 10% of resources. Or something similarly fair.man cgrules.conf,man cgsetandman cgconfig.confshould get you started. This at least in Fedora 16, did not have time to check other distributions right now if they have similar config file names. Probably they do.EDIT: Oh, just noticed from your comments you are using NFS. Then your network might be saturated and you need to use QoS with
tcandiptables. Google forAdvances Linux Routing How-To, it has ready-made examples of throttling the traffic and creating priority classes. Or if possible, do the throttling at your firewall/router/load balancer.Could also be an old kernel version having issues with NFS or bad NFS mount options.