Forward port 80 to 8080 on my server, will users blocking port 8080 have access to my site?

Question

I have a web application running on tomcat on port 8080. The application must be accessible due to a very strict firewall. Will port forwarding from 80 to 8080 allow users to access the application for blocking the 8080 firewall?

If not, what other options do I have?

I follow these instructions for port forwarding

Step 1: View Current Firewall Rules

sudo ipfw show

Step 2: add a port forwarding rule (80 to 8080)

The default port on which Tomcat runs is 8080, so here we show the command to port transfer from port 80 to 8080 (the default port is Tomcats). Obviously, this works for other ports as well, and you just need to configure the command accordingly.

sudo ipfw add 100 fwd 127.0.0.1,8080 tcp from any to any 80 in

This is a temporary change and will be returned after a reboot. If you want to make it permanent, you can create a lauch deamon for it.

Optional rule deletion

If you want to remove the firewall rules:

sudo ipfw flush

Answer 1

Yes, it will work, since the forwarding is performed on your computer, it looks outside as if it were on port 80. We had a similar setup, and it worked fine.

Of course, if the firewall is very strict, they may have other blocking rules that can interfere (perhaps they only allow specific IP addresses).