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From: trier@odin.INS.CWRU.Edu (Stephen C. Trier)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
Subject: Re: Appache WWW Server - Help needed
Followup-To: comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix
Date: 21 Aug 1995 12:32:04 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <419uc4$6nv@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
References: <40qgdm$35u@noc.tor.hookup.net> <jcaron-1608950011550001@mon2-07.planete.net> <40ub42$4um@palmer.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: odin.ins.cwru.edu
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:4850 comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix:2933
In article <40ub42$4um@palmer.demon.co.uk>,
Gary Palmer <gary@palmer.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>True, but there is a hard, and un-reliable way of doing it. You can probably
>hack your WWW server to use the `auth' port on the client machine to
>find out the username.
This is possible, but it's not necessary to go this far if one wants
only an approximation of a username. Most Web browsers report an
e-mail address in the From: header sent in the HTTP dialog. It's up to
the server to log or discard this header. It's also up to the user to
configure the browser with his or her address. Unix browsers can get
the address automatically, but PC and Mac browsers usually use a
user-configured e-mail reply address.
This is definitely not good enough for access control, but if your
desire is to gather some non-scientific statistics on number of users,
it may be good enough.
If you want to use the user ID for access control purposes, you need to
look into using HTTP authentication on Apache.
This doesn't have much to do with FreeBSD, so I've redirected followups
over to comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix.
Stephen
--
Stephen Trier "Dessine-moi un mutton"
trier@ins.cwru.edu - Le Petit Prince
KG8IH