[toong]

Authbind looks really appropriate here.

(Hmm, did parent just edit his comment ? He didn't mention authbind when I hit reply, did he ?)

From the man page: authbind allows a program which does not or should not run as root to bind to low-numbered ports in a controlled way. The shared library loaded using LD_PRELOAD overrides the bind(2) system call. When a program invoked via authbind calls bind to bind a socket to a low-numbered TCP/IP port, and if the program doesn't already have an effective uid of 0, the version of bind supposed by authbind forks and executes a setuid-root helper program.

You can create configuration file like /etc/authbind/byport/port and use standard linux file permissions to allow certain non-root users to bind to ports < 1024