Re: [Slashcode-development] Alternate passwd systems.

[Clifton W. <cl...@sl...>]

On Tuesday 11 November 2003 09:56, Chris Johnson wrote:
>      Has any work been done on alternate passwd systems?  I'm
> specifically interested in NIS.

No work has been done specifically for NIS, but I don't see 
the problem in making, say, a Slash::Apache::User::NIS and using
that as a PerlAccessHandler for your site.

As best I understand it: your handler should return DECLINED if 
decides to pass access handling along to another module, FORBIDDEN 
if the user is denied access (ie banned) or OK if the user has 
authenticated properly. If you need to redirect the user to another 
URI/URL for some reason, initialize the redirect and return 
REDIRECT. And, of course, to make matters more confusing, if you 
expect to handle SSL logic, that should be done here as well.

After looking at Slash::Apache::User::handler(), I'm not quite
so sure as to how well using DECLINED will work. I suspect
that returning DECLINED would allow you to pass control along
to another PerlAccessHandler, that way you could use the proposed 
Slash::Apache::User::NIS, and if necessary, fall back to 
Slash::Apache::User. I think it's possible, but you might want to
do a little research on the internals of a PerlAccessHandler to 
be sure.

There's a load of other stuff, you might want to try and parse
Slash::Apache::User::handler() to see all of the conditions it 
handles and whether or not they are applicable to what you 
are trying to do.

Hope this is enough to get you started.

- Cliff