Start/Restart/Stop Daemons thru PHP problem

[chris5h]

So I am trying to make a little back end PHP admin to start, restart, and stop some of my daemons. I already made a little PHP interface to to wget files without needing to SSH in. It is just done with an HTML file with a webform, with a POST action to a PHP file.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
<?php
{
$file = $_POST['file'];
}
system("wget '$file'")
?>
')

Now, this works great, so I thought to myself, if it works for wget why not rc.d start commands.

So, first, I tried:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
<?php
system("rc.d start samba")
?>
')

Which give me the error:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')A daemon is starting another daemon, this is unlikely to work as intended. :: Starting Samba Server [BUSY] [FAIL]

[pepedog]

What user is executing the script? If a web server, it will be apache. Webmin can do it for other systems, but it runs as root I believe.

[chris5h]

I dont have a user "apache". I do have an HTTP user and as a test I added it to the root group but it still is giving me the same error message

[tomcheng76]

does SUID works?
make the owner of the script file to root....
although doing such thing is highly not recommended.......
perhaps you can do some authentication in php side, but you cannot control users in the server os, they have controls to run the scripts anyway.

[chris5h]

I changed the ownership of samba.sh to root and chmod'd ti SUID. Here's the ls -l results:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
-r-sr-xr-x 1 http root 22 May 21 20:35 samba.sh
')

But I get the same exact error.

[pepedog]

/etc/php/php.ini (restart httpd after changes)
safe_mode = Off

; By default, Safe Mode does a UID compare check when
; opening files. If you want to relax this to a GID compare,
; then turn on safe_mode_gid.
safe_mode_gid = Off

; When safe_mode is on, UID/GID checks are bypassed when
; including files from this directory and its subdirectories.
; (directory must also be in include_path or full path must
; be used when including)
safe_mode_include_dir =

; When safe_mode is on, only executables located in the safe_mode_exec_dir
; will be allowed to be executed via the exec family of functions.
safe_mode_exec_dir =

[chris5h]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pepedog', '/')etc/php/php.ini (restart httpd after changes)
safe_mode = Off

; By default, Safe Mode does a UID compare check when
; opening files. If you want to relax this to a GID compare,
; then turn on safe_mode_gid.
safe_mode_gid = Off

; When safe_mode is on, UID/GID checks are bypassed when
; including files from this directory and its subdirectories.
; (directory must also be in include_path or full path must
; be used when including)
safe_mode_include_dir =

; When safe_mode is on, only executables located in the safe_mode_exec_dir
; will be allowed to be executed via the exec family of functions.
safe_mode_exec_dir =

[chris5h]

If anyone is interested I figured out a solution to this.

I installed SUDO and added http as a user that could sudo without a password. The a change the PHP script to actually SUDO the command , so it is: sudo rc.d start samba

And it works great. Woot!