From: "Stephen Turner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Jonathan Feldman wrote: > > > > <FontFamily><param>Arial</param>In the Status code report i am told > > > > 3777: 401 Authentication required > > > > <FontFamily><param>Arial</param>I take this to mean that 3777 requests > > were made, possibly (very probably!) some made by the same people, to > > areas of our website that require a password. True or false? > > Erm, I think so, but I'm not sure exactly how servers handle authentication. > Maybe someone else could answer this better.
In most cases, when you access a Basic Authetication protected area, the browser sends a request, receives a 401 response, prompts the user for a password, and then tries the same request with the username and password. Even though the person successfully authenticates, the initial request is still logged as a 401. (The web server has already logged the 401 long before the successful authentication arrives, so this is perfectly reasonable behaviour). This will probably be quite obvious if you extract the entries from an IP address that you know uses authentication, and look at the raw data. The first access per "session" to a given authentication domain will generate a 401 error. And by "session", I mean a from the time a browser is opened on the remote workstation to the time it is closed, not the time it spends at your site. If you leave your browser open for a week, and visit thousands of other sites, it will usually remember authentication details for your site for all that time (though there may be a limit on how many different sets of credentials it will remember). Aengus +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------
