Have you considered using "sudo"? With this package installed you can specify certain commands to be run by a (group of) user(s) as root. You can even limit this to the prescribed usage of certain parameters (for instance, a user might be allowed to do a "ls -l" as root, but not a "ls -a", etc.).

It looks like you could tailor this to exactly your needs.

I hope this helps.

bakunin