Isn't it amazing what no sleep and lots of Coke (the soda not the drug although I guess the drug would do fun things too) will do for you 8-). I am looking for a mechanism to restrict access to other web services such as:

• access to a cvs repository via ViewCVS.
• access to a search engine e.g. swish-e.
• access to mail archives via hypermail.
• access to majorcool interface to majordomo mailing lists

I was thinking of leveraging the TWiki installation and linking access to twiki pages that would list the people who are allowed access. E.G. there would be a AllowAccessViewCVS page with users on it. Then the page would be scanned, the users' twiki password entries would be copied to another .htpassword file associated with the service.

I am thinking of a plugin that would be configured out of band, (or maybe via its plugin page but I am not confortable with that) and use that to determine if a given topic should be scanned for users. It would look a lot like a twiki group page (see TWikiAccessControl). When the topic is viewed (e.g. after an edit) it takes the listed users' password entry out of twiki's .htpasswd file and puts them into a .htpasswd file that is used for access to each service.

The only problem I see is that the service password will be out of sync if a ChangePassword is done, but the service access page isn't viewed. This may be able to be handled by a bookview search of the Main web looking for some unique token (say % ACCESSLIST%) that is used to enable the password generation. The lack of a % ACCESSLIST% token would disable the generation on a page that is configured in the plugin to be permitted to use the % ACCESSLIST% token. Alterntively, the page could be viewed, or the plugin run out of cron. If the plugin determined that the last change date on the page was older then the .htaccess file, it would just exit. It should be a quick operation.

Hmm, maybe I should just go to sleep instead.

-- JohnRouillard - 18 Aug 2002

Perhaps what I am implementing in AuthCookieHandlerPluginDev could help ...

-- AndreaSterbini - 24 Sep 2002