mod_perl waters too deep

You may have seen my other recent questions to the list this month, the 
gist of which is:

I want to setup an application for multiple clients, each of whom have 
their own users.

http://www.site.com/clientA/application.pl
http://www.site.com/clientB/application.pl
http://www.site.com/clientX/application.pl

So the users of "clientA" log in to 
http://www.site.com/clientA/application.pl and are authenticated with 
Apache2::AuthCookieDBI

Now the directories clientA, clientB, etc. do not exist, I'm using 
mod_rewrite to sort that out, and here starts my problems.  First I'm 
lost with authenticating since there's no "real" resource to 
authenticate against, but I seem to have solved that by forcing 
authentication against all *.pl files which luckily do exist ;)

It gets more complicated later because some URLs like
http://www.site.com/clientA/iCal can't use session cookies but have to 
use BASIC AUTH, and other *.pl files can't have any authentication 
applied against them.

I thought I could solve this by writing a MyAuthCookieDBI.pm but this 
also isn't working out.  For example MyAuthCookieDBI is an almost-empty 
child.  The parent (Apache2::AuthCookieDBI) has a function 
_dbi_connect() which manages all the database connecting, but I can't 
overwrite that function, even if MyAuthCookieDBI is the calling object 
the function from Apache2::AuthCookieDBI always gets called rather than 
the overridden function in my object.

That's kind of the tip of things, basically I'm realizing that I need 
professional help with this task before I end up requiring professional 
help for my nerves!

So if anyone can help with this then please contact me offlist with terms.

Thanks!

Tosh

-- 
McIntosh Cooey - Twelve Hundred Group LLC - http://www.1200group.com/