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High Performance User Authentication

The standard password authentication module for Apache web servers uses a flat file that must be sequentially searched to verify user passwords, which can degrade performance for servers with more than a few hundred users. Using a database for password storage provides faster indexed retrieval compared to searching a flat file and two Apache modules support password databases as an alternative high-performance authentication method.

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JeandelaSagesse
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10 views1 page

High Performance User Authentication

The standard password authentication module for Apache web servers uses a flat file that must be sequentially searched to verify user passwords, which can degrade performance for servers with more than a few hundred users. Using a database for password storage provides faster indexed retrieval compared to searching a flat file and two Apache modules support password databases as an alternative high-performance authentication method.

Uploaded by

JeandelaSagesse
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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HighPerformance User Authentication

If the server has more than a few users who are required to use password authentication to
access the website, the performance of the standard password file will be inadequate. The
standard authentication module, mod_auth, uses a flat file that must be searched
sequentially to find the user's password. Searching a flat file of only a few hundred entries
can be very time consuming.
An alternative is to store the passwords in an indexed database. Two modules,
mod_auth_dbm and
mod_auth_db, provide support for password databases. They are used in exactly the same
way as the standard flat file authentication. The only differences are the directives used to
define the database inside the httpd.conf file and the command used to add passwords to the
password database. The AuthUserFile directive used for the flat file is replaced by
AuthDBUserFile for
mod_auth_db or by AuthDBMUserFile for mod_auth_dbm. Our sample Red Hat system has
the mod_auth_db module installed. Listing 6.6 shows the example from Listing 6.5 rewritten
to use a database file on the sample Red Hat system.

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