Exec commands from a webpage

[nerve]

I am trying to figure out how to exec system commands from a web page by calling a cgi perl script - the problem I am having is that it seems I can only exec as the web services user and I need to be exec'ing as root (Yes I am aware of the security implications of this).

Any ideas on how to either SU in the script or otherwise overcome this problem?

As an example I would like to restart sendmail using the following command from a button on a website:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart

Which requires I be root.

[silent11]

download and take a look at the source of webmin. It does a buch of sysadmin tasks from a web interface. Webmin also allows you to do tasks/issue commands as root.

http://www.webmin.com/