Re: How does authentication work?

On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, John F. Navratil wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I need to understand authentication from "soup to nuts" and I haven't gotten
> as far as the first 's'.
>
> Can anyone give me a thumbnail description of the authentication process and
> point me to the docs. I don't mind doing my own research, I just need to
> get booted in the right direction.

I took a stab at it:

23.1. How does Authentication work in Squid?

  Note: The information here is current for version 2.4.

  Authentication is actually performed outside of main Squid process.
  When Squid starts, it spawns a number of authentication subprocesses.
  These processes read usernames and passwords on stdin, and reply with
  "OK" or "ERR" on stdout. This technique allows you to use a number of
  different authentication schemes, although currently you can only use
  one scheme at a time.

  The Squid source code comes with a few authentcation processes. These
  include:

  o LDAP: Uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

  o NCSA: Uses an NCSA-style username and password file.

  o MSNT: Uses a Windows NT authentication domain.

  o PAM: Uses the Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules scheme.

  o SMB: Uses a SMB server like Windows NT or Samba.

  o getpwam: Uses the old-fashioned Unix password file.

  In order to authenticate users, you need to compile and install one of
  the supplied authentication modules, one of the others
  <http://www.squid-cache.org/related-software.html#auth>, or supply
  your own.

  You tell Squid which authentcation program to use with the
  authenticate_program option in squid.conf. You specify the name of
  the program, plus any command line options if necessary. For example:

  authenticate_program /usr/local/squid/bin/ncsa_auth /usr/local/squid/etc/passwd
Received on Tue Jul 11 2000 - 14:43:20 MDT