disabled exec() functions and security

[lamplight]

Hi
Im testing out cacti on a couple of servers that I manage. They are shared servers with many hosting accounts, running cpanel. I had to enable exec() on one of my servers in order for cacti to run. there was another php function i had to enable as well but I forget which one it was.

My question is, is there a way to run cacti without enabling these potentially dangerous functions in php?

if not, is there a way to disable these functions for all users exect the one i setup cacti under? or something similar to this?

I wish there was a way to do this since the data collection appears to run from the cron job which has nothing to do with a web server.. so it would be nice to let this part work without exec() security considerations and still have dangerous functions disabled for the web server. If this is possible I don't know how to go about managing it.

Any tips ?

Thanks!