I will second that note. I am 39 years old, have been running windows based servers for around 25 years, I have a certificate 3 and 4 in networking with security components, about half way through my bachelor of comp sci and about to take on my diploma in networking. I have taken steps to completely isolate my servers on the network, including but not limited to multiple gateways, routing, firewalls and port management. Do not do what I am doing as it will open up not only your server but your entire network to attack.


NEO: Please don't be mad with me, I do understand and I do welcome your advice however as mentioned before, I am not concerned with the security issues of privately hosted public minecraft servers.

------ Post updated at 01:42 AM ------

I would like to propose a more secure way of doing this, which after some testing I have found works just as well. Rather than adding www-data to the sudoers, simply use php to write to a file and have a script monitor that file for changes. The limitation is that a script would likely be run on a cron job which I think the minimum interval is 1 minute. If you would like more help with this method, please create a new thread.



Here is the php code to write to the file.

Code:

<?php

if ($_GET['start']) {
  $old_path = getcwd();
  chdir('/my/path/');
  
  # This code will run if ?run=true is set.  
  $output = shell_exec("echo 'start' > ./operations.txt"); # You can also use >> to append.
  echo $output;

  chdir($old_path);
}
?>


<!-- This link will add ?run=true to your URL, myfilename.php?run=true -->
<a href="?start=true" color="green">start</a>