Re: Serving specific files with some authentication

[Sasan Dashtinezhad]

Thanks a lot Tom for the cool information. I think I'm going to use all of the stuff you referred me to.

Regarding the language in which the client is written, it's not chosen yet! This is an academicd project, and we're just starting, and I'm experimenting with different stuff. The goal is to have a prototype ready as quickly as possible, and yet don't sacrifice too much. Right now, I'm thinking about implementing the client side in JAva, because we will eventually want to run the client on different platforms.

Cheers,
--Sasan

Tom Schindl wrote:

On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 20:56, Sasan Dashtinezhad wrote:
  

Hi guys,

My question is more site-development related.

What I plan to do is to distribute tasks to clients which will connect 
to the Web server. Jobs are defined in files, residing on the server, 
and clients have to be somehow authenticated (nothing really serious, 
they just need to be privously registered in the site) My question is 
what is a good and easy to implement way to do this? 
    

A small registration form using a database system(e.g. MySQL,
SQLLite,...) should do the trick.

For authentication take a look at
http://search.cpan.org/~abh/Apache-DBI-0.94/AuthDBI.pm

  

The other 
constraint is that a program should be able to download a task too (no 
user interaction is allowed.)

I was thinking of having the files defining the jobs in a password 
protected directory and then making the programs send the username and 
password to the server. But I don't know how to do that. The other 
    

If you are using HTTP-authentification you could the use HTTP-libs the
language you've chosen provides?

What is the language you've written your client-app in?
e.g. Java => http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/
e.g. Perl => http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/libwww-perl-5.76/
...

Tom

  

problemm is that I'm not really happy with this desing, and was thinking 
that there might be better ways to do it. Yet another problem is that 
how will the client download the file? I was hoping to redirect the 
client to the URL to the file. Is there a better way to do this...?

Has anybody done this before? Any suggestions or comments are welcome.

Sorry folks, but I'm just new to all of this...

Cheers,
--Sasan