Re: browser keeps prompting for authentication.

From: Brett Lymn <blymn@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 12:22:49 +1030 (CST)

According to Dancer:
>
>
>Think about this: A no-authentication required page (say a frameset) includes
>other authentication-required objects (pages in frames, as an example, or images
>or whatnot).
>

Yes, I think what you are saying is correct. The interesting thing is
that if the page is in the squid cache the multiple authentications
are not seen. I saw this when I was trying to work out what was going
wrong - I loaded the "problem" page and saw all the prompts, cancelled
them and reloaded which gave me the correct page. I then quite my
Netscape browser, and started it again and re-visited the same page,
this time there was only one authentication prompt which is the
correct behaviour. This behaviour persisted even after flushing the
browser cache. If I flush the squid cache the problem resurfaces
until the pages are in the squid cache again. Very odd.

>Browser parallelises the fetches to some limited degree. Each one comes back with
>a 401 Authentication Required, and the browser dutifully pops the box up for it.
>Each and every time. If the authentication dialog was application-modal, the
>username and password would be available for at least some of the subsequent
>requests, and the user wouldn't be prompted much further.
>

Can I make this application modal? Maybe I should dummy up a "login"
page on an internal web server that people use to login so that by the
time they hit the internet their browser already has the
authentication sorted out. At the moment I have the caches set up so
they only want authentication when the user attempts to browse hosts
external to our corporate network. I know there are some people here
that would love to have the authentication go away and are trying to
find some solid reason to make it go away.

-- 
===============================================================================
Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
===============================================================================
Received on Thu Jan 27 2000 - 00:01:23 MST

This archive was generated by hypermail pre-2.1.9 : Tue Dec 09 2003 - 16:50:44 MST