Uh, is there a general wish-list for this stuff?  We have our own auth
module which interfaces to AOLServer very similarly to nsperm (so only
handles basic) that we're trying to extend to also support
session/cookie authentication in a mixed environment.  One problem I've
had is in the Ns_Conn headers (3.4.2) -- there is no state
distinguishing whether the user name can be trusted.  My current design
calls for handling session/cookie work in a pre-auth filter, at which
point I'm stuffing an output header with the valid user name, since
there's no way to set the authUser field from TCL, and no way to tell
the auth module that the reason there's no password is that the session
system handled the authentication using non-Basic headers.

Also, since the C auth module interface in that version doesn't get the
Ns_Conn pointer in its callback, it either has to do tricks to discover
it (so it can read cookies), or live without access to other request
headers (e.g., cookies).  That's one reason to do the session work in a
pre-auth filter instead.

I'd be happier with a solution that had separate fields; i.e., in the
request struct, the parsed values from the incoming request, but in the
conn struct, the decisions made by the auth modules.  "authUser" should
mean "authenticated user" through the whole processing pipeline (and
thus be assumed empty until auth is complete); perhaps "reqUser" to mean
"claimed user" (& reqPassword, similarly).  AFAICT, there's no reason to
have an authPassword field.

My apologies for the distraction if the wonders that built 4.x solved
this already :-)
-- ReC

-----Original Message-----
From: AOLserver Discussion [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Bas Scheffers
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 5:20 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] Module help

Dossy Shiobara said:
> Yeah, that whole "lets send an absolute time in the Set-Cookie header
> for expiration stamp instead of a relative time" was pretty
bone-headed.
Well, apperantly cookies were created by the same guy that gave us the
<blink> tag, so go figure! ;-)

> I know one module that many folks wanted to see improvements made to
> is the nsperm module.  I'm in favor of a better name (i.e., "nsauth")
> and
I had been thinking about an AOLserver user API, and then people can
implement what they want, be it (XML) file based, SQL, LDAP, SQL +
Session cached, whatever. And provide some basic implementations as
well. This could be used for basic auth, but also in your own apps.


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