Trying to do authentication with htpasswd file

[Jeffrey M.Vinocur]

On Mar 25, 2005, at 2:38 PM, Lisa Ungar wrote:

> auth "forumslogin" {
>    hosts: "techstudy.watson.ibm.com"
>    auth:  "/usr/local/news/bin/auth/passwd/ckpasswd -f
> /usr/local/news/w3appusers"
>    default: "<FAIL>"
> }

(You don't need the full path to ckpasswd, by the way.)


> The ckpasswd command works when I do the echo test,

By this you mean manually generating ClientAuthname/ClientPassword as 
input?  If so, then there's nothing wrong with your password file 
"w3appusers" itself or the way you generate it -- presumably htpasswd 
generates crypted (and not MD5) passwords by default on your system.

(For future reference, recent versions of ckpasswd have -u and -p flags 
that make testing much easier.)


> [...] from my  News client it says bad_auth inside my news.notice file.

No other details in news.notice...hmm...does your password have a space 
in it, by any chance?


> Should I add the res: ident  information to the readers.conf stanzas?

Definitely not.  That should only be used by people who already have 
identd widely implemented on their networks -- if your users are 
connecting from unix machines that are centrally administered, you 
might fall in this category, but you'd want to talk to the people who 
manage your user database / remote authentication stuff to find out if 
identd is available to you.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org