The "old-school" way of doing this - and this approach is still perfectly good, assuming you haven't done anything strange with the "mount" command for your current partition - is to create a compiled program that does just that one thing (i.e., start ntpd) and is set as 'chown root:www-data myprog; chmod 4750 myprog' - meaning that only users belonging to group 'www-data' (or the root user) could execute it, and that it was run as root (SUID). Then, that program is executed by the CGI program as appropriate. This is fairly secure, and works well.


--
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
-- B. L. Whorf

In reply to Re: Perl CGI ability to start linux services by oko1
in thread Perl CGI ability to start linux services by iphony

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.