I am working on an application that runs locally on a Fedora 10 machine through PHP and Apache. It depends on a process that runs in the background.
The higher-ups want to be able to start/stop/restart the process, through the browser. I was trying to get this to work by having PHP make calls to the system using exec() and shell_exec, but it doesn’t seem to work.
When I try to start the process using ‘exec(‘processName’)’, nothing happens.
When I try to use ‘exec(‘killall processName’)’, SELinux starts constantly popping up warnings that the process was permitted (because I put it into permissive mode), however it doesn’t actually kill the process! But this seems to go on even after the page is fully loaded!?!?
I AM able to call another script in a similar fashion: ‘exec(‘/var/www/cgi-bin/ControlProgram START’)’. So I’m not really sure what the major differences are between the two calls/commands.
I also put the script call into the /etc/rc.local file to have the script run at login. However, will I be able to kill this script from PHP since its run by… the system?
I’m not a guru when it comes to permissions/SELinux, so don’t spare on the gory details! Thanks in advance!
I believe I found the problem. I’m still not exactly sure what the problem is, but it looks like it has something to do with file/directory permissions. When I moved the scripts into my /var/www/html directory, the scripts ran. I moved them into /var/www/cgi-bin and they work there too. So it might be something where apache can’t execute scripts that are outside the /var/www directory, or at least it can’t do it directly. Thanks for your help though!