Newbie question-- Perl pw authentication without pop-up prompt

From: Mike O'Leary (mike_at_muchsarcasm.com)
Date: 04/22/04 

Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 10:22:44 -0400

Hello, forgive me if this is the worng group to be asking this in, but I
hope you guys can help this relative newbie out. My boss is looking to
password protect certain areas of the server, but with the following
stipulation: The username and password must be entered in a form, and
not using the standard .htaccess pop-up window. He's specifically
looking for either of the following:

1) A perl script that utilizes the .htaccess protections of the
company's Apache server, but doesn't bring up the pop-up password box.

2) Something that completely foregoes .htaccess, but still provides
similar protection using a login page.

So far we've tried a program called Locked Area Lite, which is an
excellent program that did exactly what we needed except for one
problem: A change from Internet Explorer 5 to Internet Explorer 6 has
eliminated the method that Locked Area used to send the password via an
html page.

We also have a copy of the Cgi-Perl Cookbook, which has a script called
authenticate.cgi, but it never seemed to work.

I've checked through groups.google.com and have sifted through numerous
posts but none of which have given us a solution.

Also, in your opinion, is a perl/cgi based authentication setup secure.
 I've seen a few newsgroup posts that hint it's not as effective as
.htaccess, but I'd be curious to know if it would be best not to use on
a company web server.

Thank you for your time. Any assistance is appreciated.

Mike O

Relevant Pages

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