[squid-users] Re: squid authentication problem

Payal Rathod wrote:

> So I am trying squid to authenticate with simple ncsa_auth against a
> htaccess file. But here I have a problem that whenever a user opens
> another window of IE she has to give password and username. Even if she
> saves it she has to press ENTER.

How and when the user is prompted for a username and password is up to the
browser, not Squid. All Squid does is tell the browser that authentication
is required and which authentication methods are supported.

The only thing you can do from Squid's end is consider switching from basic
authentication to NTLM auth, which makes the authentication transparent to
the end user. NTLM auth, though, has its own drawbacks:

1) Its design is inherently broken for use as an HTTP authentication scheme.
The Squid developers have thoroughly explained this in the archives.

2) It requires more authentication helpers than basic auth does for the same
number of clients, increasing the load on your Squid server

On the client end, you could try a browser that supports tabbed browsing
(such as Mozilla Firefox). Since the tabs are all in one instance of the
browser, the browser will likely reuse the proxy authentication credentials
without prompting the user for each new tab.

Adam
Received on Fri Jul 02 2004 - 08:11:45 MDT