Ok, I'll take a crack at this ...

Is the script accessing the parallel port via /dev/lp* or are you
running a little binary that does low-level x86 port in/out read/writes?

If you are using /dev/lp*, then you can change the permissions to allow
anyone to use it:

crw-rw----    1 root     lp         6,   0 Apr 11  2002 /dev/lp0
(default on my laptop, redhat 7.2)

a "chmod o+rw /dev/lp0" (as root) gives:
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     lp         6,   0 Apr 11  2002 /dev/lp0

and now anyone can read/write the lp0 port.  This may be a security
issue; if not, I think this will solve your problem.  I went through
this with the serial port, which by default users can't open, a hassle
since I use it all the time for talking with PICs.

If not let me know.  I run linux as my desktop but I'm still a realative
newbie.

Jesse

Herbert Graf wrote:
> Was wondering if someone here would be able to help me with something.
>
> I have a script on a linux machine that runs a program that accesses the
> parallel port. It seems that I can only access the port as root. The problem
> is I'd like to run the script as apache (in the cgi-bin).
>
> I've tried setuid but that fails. Anyone know how I might open up hardware
> access to user apache? Or how to get apache to run the script AS root?
>
> Thanks, TTYL
>
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