[Xitami] Password problems

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <000c01c0f85a$99d9b260$830a5f82@hm.uwa.edu.au>, "Don Gordon" writes:
>Using Xitami v2.4d9 on Windows 98. Have set up directory password list in
>defaults.aut. This setup works fine except with IE when it encounters a web
>page that contains 2 Real Audio files. The page loads ok but when you click
>on the play button IE requests the Username & Password again before it will
>play the file. The problem does not occur if password restrictions are
>removed.

Is it IE requesting the username/password again?  Or real player?

There's two things I can think of which might be going on here: 
(a) the files are in different directories, and you've got two sets of
    protections being applied, with different realms.  You can work 
    around this problem by setting the realm name in the .aut file
    for both protected directories to be the same (and making sure the
    same usernames/passwords apply to both).

(b) IE (which gets the authentication for the HTML page) and real player
    (which gets the authentication for the audio) do not talk to each
    other to exchange authentication information.  Which mean that both
    have to ask for that information.  This is certainly the case when
    real player is used externally, but I'm not sure if it is the case
    when it is embedded in a webpage.

Basically if you are going to password protect both HTML and audio, and
use two applications which don't talk to each other to exchange password
information, then both will have to ask the user for the password
information.

There are ways to design a system that protects the HTML and audio
without requiring the password to be entered twice, but it requires
server-side code (CGIs, LRWP, servlets, etc), and doing much of the
server-side authentication handling yourself, rather than relying on the
webservers build in basic authentication.

Ewen

-- 
Ewen McNeill, Technical Consultant, iMatix Corporation  www.imatix.com