Re: Authenticating Neomail with Apache mod_auth

On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Torsten Mueller wrote:

>> I run a number of Perl based applications e.g Calendar Scheduling,  and
>> authenticate using Apache mod_auth. Since I have captured the
>> authenticated user as an ENV var REMOTE_USER I wanted to then access
>> Neomail without further authentication. ( Note , new Linux users are
>> added are added automatically to my mod_auth password file )
>>
>> I thought I could do this by adding the following to checklogin.pl
>> my $remoteuser = $ENV{'REMOTE_USER'};
>> if (length($remoteuser)> 1) {exit 0;}
>> ( this is executed before check for ( $passwdfile && $username &&
>> $password )
>>
>> and call neomail with arguments
>> neomail.pl?action=login
>>
>> No Luck so far.
>>
>> I would appreciate any hints or tips
>
>This is not an easy task i doubt.
>You have to change the auth model and the
>session timout handling.
>
>As neomail currently uses a session id you have to
>substitute the sessionid-model or
>create the correct sessionid in checklogin.pl
>
>There is no ready to run solution available i know, so
>you are on your own.

Well, I must disagree.

First, it is an easy task, because neomail just has to take the user from
apache as done above with

  my $remoteuser = $ENV{'REMOTE_USER'}

The other line,

  if (length($remoteuser)> 1) {exit 0;}

is absolute useless, because only non-empty users whose password get apache to
execute the script at all.

Further more, data/checklogin.pl can be ignored.


Secondly, I can provide a ready-to-run solution:

We have adopted neomail not only to use apache's .htaccess based
authentication (which allows e.g. to use any authentication method
apache supports, LDAP in our case).

We have further changed it a bit to support our multi domain environment,
i.e. we do not force the user to use a certain domain in his sender email
address.

You can find our changed neomail.pl and neomail-prefs.pl at our Open Source
page http://www.ibcl.at/ossw/

Unfortunately, I do not have the time to seperate the to changes e.g. in
two .patch files, but I believe the changes concerning authentication does
only occur in the area of neomail.pl in which checklogin.pl is called
(or, better, is not called any more now ;->>>).

Finally I kind of apologize for not to have announced our work earlier ;-))


kr


Christoph Lechleitner

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