ok folks, here's an interesting hair-tearing story which might save someone else's hair.

I'm working on my nt4/sp3 workstation,
using dbman 2.04, xitami server (it's fantastic - forget apache/microsloth etc if you're using nt !) and going crazy because I can't get dbman to work requiring authentication with no default user or selfsignup allowed.

Tracing using &cgierror(variable of interest) liberally to check status returns and so on, I eventually discover that xitami is returning a dash ("-") as the "remote_user" in the cgi environment !

Soooo, even though I'm not using server authentication, when in auth.pl, the line
my ($server_auth) = $ENV{'REMOTE_USER'} | | $ENV{'AUTH_USER'};
executes, $server_auth contains a single dash and is not null - so dbman thinks that I'm logged in via server authentication with userid "-" which of course doesn't exist in my dbman password file - you can imagine the rest....

Moral of the story - if you use xitami and dbman, edit the line above (line 45 in auth.pl) to remove remote_user from the equation.

dbman works perfectly then....maybe add to the FAQ Alex ?


------------------
Dr Ross Lazarus
Associate Professor and Sub-Dean for Information Technology
Faculty of Medicine, Room 124, A27, University of Sydney,
Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia
Tel: (+61 2) 93514429 Mobile: +61414872482
Fax: (+61 2) 93516646 Email: rossl@med.usyd.edu.au
http://www.health.usyd.edu.au/people/rossl.htm

Hi thanks for the post it worked for my server. You will find a post yesterday that I ran in to this problem but with your fix it works find now.
thanks onece again
Simon

Hi Ross,

Thanks for the fix! Man, I hate it when web servers do things like that. According to the CGI interface, REMOTE_USER is meant to be empty if the user is not authenticated.

I'll add it into the FAQ..

Cheers,

Alex