readers.conf and authentication question

[g.lams at itcilo.it]

Thank you Dieter and Jeffrey for your answers,
The use of Apache's htpasswd would be interesting (also because I'm a 
beginner perl developer) but it is not really  clear to me how I could 
then associate a user to a one or more newsgroups (the htpasswd contains 
only username and password)?
For instance, in our case, no newsgroup is public (i.e anonymously 
accessible), but there are a few newsgroups which are accessible by all 
the students (in addition to the newsgroup of their own course).

Another question: let's say I write a perl cgi that would allow those 
"teachers" to create from the web a newsgroup (automatically creating the 
htpasswd file), I would then need to add the Auth and Access section in 
the readers.conf. As those sections would always be the same, I suppose I 
could automatically add them at the end of the file, couldn't I?

I will read the ckpasswd man page regarding the -d files.

Have a nice day all and thanks for your help

Gaël


On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 g.lams at itcilo.it wrote:

> I would like to know what could be the better way of managing those 
users 
> and their passwords (I don't want to use the system shadow password 
file). 

You can store the passwords in any way you like, just configure
readers.conf appropriately.  For example, you can keep them in a flat file
(in format similar to /etc/passwd, which Apache's htpasswd will generate
for you) and use `ckpasswd -f` in readers.conf.  Or if you have a lot of
users, you can use read the ckpasswd about the format of the -d files.

Or you can write a simple script of any kind (using the general interface 
documented in doc/external-auth, or the scripting interfaces documented in 

doc/hook-*).

In other words, INN isn't going to drive this decision.  It should depend 
on what works for your other needs.


> Also, as those usernames and passwords need to be managed not by myself, 

> but by 2 "teachers", I wonder whether someone has implementated a 
> web-based management system, even a basic one.

Well sure, it's not overly complicated.  (Nothing I can share with 
you for this, though.)


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org