user authentication and access

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Sun, 29 Dec 2002, Rene Tschaggelar wrote:

> On one of the later inn versions :

It's really most helpful to give at least the major release number (2.2, 
2.3, etc), and there's really no reason not to give the full version 
(2.3.3, etc).


> We'd like to have one of multiple newsgroup to have restricted
> access, while the others should be unrestricted.
> We therefore planned to have a common username/password for
> just this newsgroup.
> Experiments however showed that this only appears to work
> with newsreaders that send the username/password ahead without
> being requested, ahem Outlook express works, whereas Netscape
> does not.

Most newsreaders have an option for "send authentication information 
always" or "send username/password without being asked" or some such 
thing.  This should solve your problems; if you can't find that option, 
try asking for help in news.software.readers (we just don't know much 
about some of the client software).


> The problem appears to start when the server is called first.
> Since it does authentication before access, and not all
> newsreaders are able to display the usernamee/password dialog,
> these newsreaders won't see this group.

I don't understand you here, although I gathered the intent from the rest 
of the message, I think.


> Netscape is said to cope with authentication, but that is said
> to apply for the whole server with all groups then.

In principle, there's no reason a server couldn't *show* a group in the 
list of groups, but prohibit access to the group without a password.  
However, INN doesn't support that functionality.

(Anybody think we should add it?  Might be interesting, and perhaps not 
too difficult.)

-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org