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Authorization configuration

The following authorization configuration directives are allowed in the global ACF. If use of the AuthConfig feature set is permitted by the AllowOverride directive in the global ACF, these directives are also allowed within directory ACFs.

The AuthUserFile directive specifies the absolute path of the user password file to be used for user authentication. For maximum security, this file should normally be located outside the Web directory hierarchy. The syntax is:

    AuthUserFile file-path

The AuthUserGroup directive specifies the absolute path of the group file, used to define groups of users for authentication. This file too should normally be located outside the Web directory hierarchy. Its syntax is similar to that of the AuthUserFile directive:

    AuthGroupFile file-path

The AuthName directive specifies an authorization realm identification (equivalent to the ServerID under the CERN server), which is used to distinguish between sets of files on the same server using different password files. The syntax of the directive is as follows:

    AuthName authorization-realm

A group of files could be tagged by the identifier web-project-group to indicate that access to them was controlled by a specific password file:

    AuthName web-project-group

The AuthType directive specifies the HTTP authorization scheme used. Only the Basic authorization scheme is currently implemented as standard. Experimental code is included in the NCSA server to handle public key encryption using the public domain PGP or PEM programs, but the code is not compiled-in to the server, by default. Use of these systems is described in an online document at the NCSA. The directive syntax is:

    AuthType { Basic  | PEM  | PGP }

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.