FLORA Community WEB Server Project: Login Domain

Login Domain

A number of the services offered by FLORA need some level of authentication check before the user can be granted these services. Services needing authentication include: FTP file maintenance, Mailbox retrieval, and Password protected WEB URL's.

An authentication system independant of the operating system LOGIN procedure is desired to limit the number of accounts actually maintained on the host. The technology chosen is a patched version of the HESIOD system that distributes /etc/passwd style entries via HESIOD, and makes use of a local shadow password file for authentication so the encrypted password does not need to be distributed.

Status

The HESIOD distribution of the namespace has been in test for a few weeks now.

The testing of the shadow password and password changing mechenism is being worked on now in parallel with the MailBox project. Work needs to be done on POPPassd program for changing passwords from Eudora. A CGI for the WEB server will also be written.

More information about the standard HESIOD distribution can be found in the information for the MailDomain project. hes_getpwnam() library call is being modified so that the password field will be filled in by the Shadow Password mechenism.
Shadow password file format chosen is the file format used by the Apache mod_auth_dbm to allow a common password file to be used between the WEB server and other services.
- dbm_open(),dbm_fetch(),dbm_close() calls from libdbm used.
- Key is username
- value=password":"groupname[":"anything]
  where password is the password encoded by crypt()
  groupname is a comma separated list of groups this user is a member of.

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Last Modified: July 28, 1996 by RWM