I was building an app on a SUSE box, and had a binary called create_group for instance, which had a suid bit and allowed my PHP app to call exec('create group grpname'); and create a new group (there are others for users, etc).

The binary was a small c script that calls setuid(0) and then runs the user creation stuff. This worked perfectly on the SUSE box

I recently moved my project to Ubuntu and everything works fine except these binaries. I can run them from the shell and they work okay, but when I get the PHP app to run them it just does nothing. Is there anything Ubuntu would be doing differently that I'm missing?