Monks,

I am hoping that some of you may be able to give me pointers on a new project that I am looking at.

I am looking to create a self contained web application that will eventually run on many Unix servers. I will not be able to install any web server software such as Apache on these servers, however they all have Perl 5.6.1 or higher on but as a twist there are several different flavours of Unix / Linux (HP-UX, Solaris, Red Hat).

The application its self will need to carry out some functions, however these will probably have to be executed as root which causes me security problems.

I have very little experience in the creation of a Perl Webserver, however I have seen some examples using HTTP:Deamon which seem to work.

How would you go about this problem. Have each server running a mini perl web server as root that can perform these tasks, or set up some sort of IPC link between a web server and the other servers to allow the access.

How is the best way to deal with security on all of the servers running the applications or is this all a pipe dream that will be near impossible for me to pull off?

I am currently only looking at design ideas at present. I have looked at some of the code for Webmin which manages to carry out many of the tasks that I require, but I don’t know if it is secure or if I could create something similar for my application.

I would love to hear anyone’s comments or suggestions on these ideas, and would be grateful if any one has any information that might help me.

Many thanks in advance,

Alistair

In reply to Secure Standalone Web Applications with super user access by allyc

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