Apache Access Control Lab

Create 3 directories under your public_html directory:

sales, marketing and engineering We want to allow salespeople to have access to the /sales documents, engineers to have access to engineering info, and everyone in the company will have access to marketing. Our company's domain will be .merrimack.edu

Now change back to your home directory:

cd ~

Now lets create a password file for our users. In your home directory create a passwd file:

htpasswd -c passwd.txt homer

Now add bart and lisa and marge to the file. You don't need to use the "-c" option once the password file is created:

htpasswd passwd.txt lisa

The password file contains a list of users and their encrypted passwords. The users in this file can be given specific access to derectories you chose. You can have as many different password files as you want, but it's generally a good idea to only have one. These user names can then be added to groups. Groups allow you to easily allow or deny access based on members of a group.

Now create a group file called groups.txt in your home directory it should contain some lines simillar to:

sales: homer

marketing: bart lisa

engineering: marge

Make sure the password and group files are readable by issuing a chmod command on each of them:

chmod 644 passwd.txt chmod 644 groups.txt

Now let's restrict access to the sales directory by creating a .htaccess file in the sales directory.

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Sales Info"
AuthUserFile /export/home/ericl/passwd.txt
AuthGroupFile /export/home/ericl/groups.txt
require group sales

To restrict access to the other two directories you'll need to create simillar .htaccess files.

If you get stuck, read about the directives in the apache documentation (require, allow, deny might be useful)