Authentication -- 3rd Party Method
written and ©1998, 99 by Kevin Flick www.flicks.com creator of Authentix

You won't want to use a third party Basic Authentication filter if

• protecting your premium content directories does not warrant the price of registration.
• Basic Authentication is not secure enough for your purposes
• you want all accounts of every type in one userbase, specifically the NT user account database, for administrative reasons.

Authentix, a third party Basic Authentication filter is the way to go if

• You want the high performance that a filter offers
• You want to be able to add and modify users from ASP and don't want the ASP pages to have SysAdmin priviledges
• You want browser independence
• You don't want any chance of compromising NT username/password security
• You want to separate your web-users from your NT Accounts
• You are concerned about performance. In addition to the speed associated with filter based solutions, AuthentiX is unique in that it does not impersonate an NT account to grant access, eliminating the CPU-expensive call to LogonUser on every request.
• You have directories you want to validate against an ODBC database
• You want to authenticate multiple IIS servers against a single ODBC machine on the LAN.
• You want to use browser based remote administration
• you need to protect all content in a directory: htm, asp, gif, jpg, zip, and so on.
• you want advanced features like
  • limiting concurrent logins,
  • bandwith, request and login throttling,
  • protect by IP, Domain Name and by referrer

 AuthentiX is a fast, filter based third party tool for IIS authentication developed by Flicks Software (me).
It allows you to protect content directories and individual files by asking for usernames and passwords held separately from the Windows NT usernames and passwords, ensuring the the security of your NT accounts.

Definitions

• ODBC = Open Database Connectivity.

 How to set up AuthentiX, a third party Basic Authentication filter

Setting up AuthentiX is easy and straighforward.

 Download the free evaluation version, unzip it and run setup.exe. Installshield will guide you through the rest of the installation process.

• Make sure Basic (Clear Text) is off and Allow Anonymous is on. You can leave Windows NT Challenge Response on or off.
• Create a user. From the main AuthentiX dialog, click the Users button, then Add. Type a username and password and click OK. The user will be added to the User List. Click OK.
• Create a group. From the main AuthentiX dialog, click the Groups button, then Add. Type a Groupname, click on a user (to highlight it) listed in the Non-Members list box, and click Add. The user will be moved to the Members list box. Click OK. You should now see the group in the group list. Click OK.
• Protect a directory. From the main AuthentiX dialog, click the Access button, then Add. Click the Browse button and select a directory that is part of your web directories, and that you would like to protect. Click the By Group button and add the group you created in the previous step. Click OK. You should now see that the group is protecting that directory. Verify that the group is protecting the desired directory and click OK twice
• Using a browser, go to the URL that the directory is accessed from using IIS. It should prompt you for your username and password.
• Type the username and password and you should be granted access.

You can see how to set up ODBC and other advanced options by downloading the online Windows help file or checking out the online Guided Tour. Because the pace of enhancements and improvements to this product sometimes outstrips the documentation, you can find out more by working with the free evaluation download.

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