unable to properly execute binaries from PHP

Question

I was building an app on a SUSE box, and had a binary called create_group for instance, which had a suid bit and allowed my PHP app to call exec('create_group grpname'); and create a new group (there are others for users, etc).

The binary was a small c script that calls setuid(0) and then runs the user creation stuff. This worked perfectly on the SUSE box

I recently moved my project to Ubuntu and everything works fine except these binaries. I can run them from the shell and they work okay, but when I get the PHP app to run them it just does nothing. Is there anything Ubuntu would be doing differently that I'm missing?

UPDATE: I've tried running one of my binaries called create_group which is essentially a groupadd wrapper, works fine from command line. When I run it in PHP and then check the apache errors logs, I have the following message:

sh: groupadd: not found

Any ideas on why this would be?

Answer 1

It might be PHP safe_mode or it might be selinux. Newer distributions have SELinux enabled which propably would interfere.

Check out sudo. It's great for these kinds of tasks.

If everything else fails write a cron entry or daemon which creates new groups.

Answer 2

safe_mode, selinux (see dmesg for audit logs) or (perhaps more likely) safe_mode_exec_dir if your scripts are outside the default PHP path.

You might also want to add debugging (even something as simple as using logger to feed into syslog) to the scripts to make it more obvious where a problem is occurring.

Answer 3

Ubuntu (server) uses AppArmor to limit some things. This may be what is causing you problems: processes started from the http server (from php) may have less rights than normal processes. It will be logged when this happens. Check AppArmor docs on how to enable your specific application without opening things completely.