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By Authentication is any process by which you verify that someone is who they claim they are. Authorization is any process by which someone is allowed to be where they want to go, or to have information that they want to have. If you have information on your Web site that is sensitive or intended for only a small group of people, the techniques in this article will help you make sure that the people that see those pages are the people that you wanted to see them. This is the first in a two-part series. In this article, I'm going to cover the standard way of protecting parts of your Web site that most of you are going to use. In the next part I'll talk about using databases, rather than text files, to contain your user and group information. Somewhere in here I'll talk about using things other than usernames and passwords to protect your web site from "intruders"--such as the IP address of the visitor. The PrerequisitesEverything from here on assumes that your web server permits And you'll need to know a little bit about the directory structure of your server, in order to know where some files are kept. This should not be terribly difficult, and I'll try to make this clear when we come to that point. Beginning with the BasicsHere's the basics of password protecting a directory on your server. You'll need to create a password file. This file should be placed somewhere outside of your document directory. This is so that folks cannot download the password file. For example, if your documents are served out of To create the file, use the htpasswd -c /usr/local/apache/passwd/password rbowen
# htpasswd -c /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords rbowen New password: mypassword Re-type new password: mypassword Adding password for user rbowen If Next, you'll need to create a file in the directory you want to protect. This file is usually called AuthType Basic AuthName "By Invitation Only" AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords AuthGroupFile /dev/null require user rbowen The next time that you load a file from that directory, you should see the familiar username/password dialog box pop up. If you don't chances are pretty good that you are not permitted to use Letting More Than One Person InThe directives above only let one person (specifically someone with a username of If you want to let more than one person in, you'll need to create a group file that associates group names with a list of users in that group. The format of this file is pretty simple, and you can create it with your favorite editor. The contents of the file will look like this: GroupName: rbowen dpitts sungo rshersey That's just a list of the members of the group in a long line separated by spaces. To add a user to your already existing password file, type: htpasswd /usr/local/apache/passwd/password dpitts You'll get the same response as before, but it will be appended to the existing file, rather than creating a new file. (It's the Now, you need to modify your AuthType Basic AuthName "By Invitation Only" AuthUserFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/passwords AuthGroupFile /usr/local/apache/passwd/groups require group GroupName Now, anyone that is listed in the group There's another way to let multiple users in that is less specific. Rather than creating a group file, you can just use the following directive: require valid-user Using that rather than the Possible ProblemsBecause of the way that basic authentication is specified, your username and password must be verified every time you request a document from the server. This is even if you're reloading the same page, and for every image on the page (if they come from a protected directory). As you can imagine, this slows things down a little. The amount that it slows things down is proportional to the size of the password file, because Apache must open up that file and go down the list of users until it gets to your name. And it has to do this every time a page is loaded. A consequence of this is that there's a limit to how many users you can put in one password file. I don't exactly know what that limit is, but I've experienced problems when I've put more than about 1,500 users in one file. People are denied access, even though you know that they have a valid username and password. It appears that what's happening is that it just takes too long to look up the password, and in the meantime, access is denied. In the next article, we'll look at one possible solution to this problem. Managing Your Password Files with PerlThis may seem a little random, but it looked like a good time to throw this in. There are two sets of Perl modules available for managing your password files and group files with Perl. The first one, which is probably the recommended one, is the The other set of modules I really only mention as shameless self-promotion. What Other Neat Stuff Can I Do?Authentication by username and password is only part of the story. Frequently you want to let people in based on something other than who they are. Something such as where they are coming from. The The usage of these directives is: allow from address where address is an IP address (or a partial IP address) or a fully qualified domain name (or a partial domain name). For example, if you have someone spamming your message board, and you want to keep them out, you could do the following: deny from 205.252.46.165 Visitors coming from that address will not be able to see the content behind this directive. If, instead, you have a machine name, rather than an IP address, you can use that: deny from dc.numbersusa.com And, if you'd like to block access from an entire domain, you can specify just part of an address or domain name: deny from 192.101.205 deny from cyberthugs.com deny from ke Using order deny,allow deny from all allow from dev.rcbowen.com Listing just the More InformationYou should also read the documentation for Next WeekNext week, I'll talk about |
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