By leamas on

The company I work for is using CA Siteminder for single sign-on capabilities, which is installed somewhere else.
I have installed the webserver authentication module. According to the description of the module, it should be a good fit.

My goal is to have it so when the users in our organization go to this intranet site, they do not need to log into Drupal. It should automatically create the user for me IF they are authenticated.

Now, here is my problem, I don't understand how this module knows where to pick up the user information. According to this article http://drupal.org/node/289199 it is a simple install and it worked. Unfortunately that wasn't the same outcome with me.

Could someone help me understand the connection between the webserver authentication module and how it accesses the users within this corporation? Hopefully I will then be able to fix the issue myself or at least know whom I need to talk to in my organization to get it to work.

Thank you in advance if you can help me.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

If your server is properly configured, it has already challenged the user before granting access to Drupal. Once the user has logged into the external authentication system, every HTTP request will pass HTTP REMOTE_USER along with the rest of the HTTP request headers.

All the authentication module really does is check to see if such a user exists (and if so, load it), else create such a user. There's some other code to clean up usernames, et cetera, but that's the heart of it. If there is no REMOTE_USER set, then of course the module will not log you in.

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/FAQ-F.html#remote-user-var

I don't know anything about CA Siteminder, but "which is installed somewhere else" may be a clue to figuring out where the problem lies.

leamas’s picture

leamas commented

Apparently I was given false information and the Siteminder isn't being used in this scenario. So ignoring that, how do I go about getting REMOTE_USER (assuming that this is the problem) set up for a Windows 2003 Server?

This server is part of a network that would have authentication set, otherwise I couldn't access this server from my PC.

Also, since I'm using Windows, and this intranet is only in test, I installed WAMP.

I've tried researching, but have not come across any resolution.