On Mon, 2007-07-02 at 21:10 -0500, Michael Schwarz wrote:

This ia just a couple of quick questions.

I'm charged with developing a prototype application that will assemble and
mount a hot-swapped drive array, mount it, transfer files to it, unmount it,
and stop the array. And it is an application delivered by a local webserver
(don't ask).

I don't want to do any of the incredibly stupid acts of making madadm and
mount/umount setuid root, nor do I want to run the webserver as root.

Instead, I took the slightly less stupid approach of invoking madadm and
mount/umount with a hardcoded C application that is setuid root. (We can
debate the stupidity of this -- I know it isn't best, but it is fast and less
stupid than the alternatives presented above).

This isn't really an answer to your question, but isn't this an ideal
application for sudo? Make a shell script with the mdadm command(s) you
want. And set it up so apache or whatever your web server runs as able
to run your shell script as root without authentication. 

Ian
-- 
Ian Dall [off-list ref]