Re: [cobalt-users] Password Authenticated Sites (Methods)

[Joe Kerns <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I use PHP auth for a lot of our database stuff...  Basically I have a table
> of users and password hashes in the MySQL database.  Additionally I have a
> permissions table that descibes what resources each user/group has
> permission to access.

There are some excellent tutorials on the webmonkey site regarding PHP and one regarding authentication with PHP:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/

> Obviously you would need to use PHP to do it this way... Also each page
> needs to be a php page for it to work.  And obviously it won't work if all
> you are serving is HTML pages.  For me its convienient because I get more
> control and all our content is dynamic anyway.

You can setup your server to parse HTML pages, so the extension won't matter. Some will argue this unnecessarily loads the server. Maybe so, but I haven't seen much of a performance hit on the server I have parsing .html files, but this
server is lightly loaded.

> > Can anyone advise? Perhaps someone has already done this without radically
> > changing the RaQ or "invalidating the warrantee".
>
> Well to do it my way, you'd need to install PHP which requires installing an
> Apache module (and either upgrading Apache or recompiling apache).

Installation with the cobalt supplied RPMs is a snap. There are instructions in the archives for compiling from source and I have used them successfully.

HTH,

Joe