Re: Basic Authentication for web pages

["Hossein S. Zadeh" <hossein bf rmit edu au>]

On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Wes Brown wrote:

> I have been looking into creating an application that will use PAM as the
> authentication mechanism for Basic Authentication of web pages.
> 
> I have the code to get the information from the server.  Now I am trying to
> figure out how the PAM library is going to know where to get the 
> password.
> 
> hoping for Kerberos IV and 5, Novell bindery, and local passwd file access.
                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You can use "nwauth" (part of ncpfs package) to authenticate to a Novell
server. Currently only bindery authentication is available. Here's a
(simple) function (in PHP) that return 0 or 1 based on bindery
authentication:

////////////////////////////////
function nwauth ($nwserver, $user, $pass) {
  $command=sprintf("echo \"%s\" | nwauth -S %s -U %s",  // parsing the
                    $pass, $nwserver, $user);          // command
    $out = array();                           // Just a dummy variable
    exec($command,$out,$auth);                // *THE* meat!
    if ($m_auth<>0){
      return 0; // failed authentication
    } else {
      return 1; // passed
    }
  }
///////////////////////////////////

You can call the function against one Novell server and if it fails call
it against another one (just in case).

Note that $pass as returned by basic authentication *may* contain trailing
'\n'. In which case you are going to have to 'chop()' it.

cheers,
Hossein

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|                            Hossein S. Zadeh                           |
|                         hossein@bf.rmit.edu.au                        |
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