Choices for root privilege

I'm in the planning stages of a smallish app that will need to run some shell commands that generally require root privileges to run (eg: route, ifconfig, ifup). I know this is a security nightmare but I don't really have a choice, I have to provide this functionality through a web based interface. What is the accepted way of accomplishing this? I've considered assigning nobody to a privileged group, sudo, changing exec permissions (last resort). Opinions??? TIA, Brad