Hi all,

So I have a question about user authentication.

What i'd like is either a login page or something, such that only valid users can access to the site.

Now here's the tricky bit: I want the valid users to not be defined by .htpasswd or anything like that. I want the valid users to be those who can log into the server. And I want to use there logins/passwords for the server.

The reason I'm doing this is so that everytime a new user is added to the server (this is in a research lab), I won't have to update .htpasswd or any other files.

Any help would be appreciated!

I imagine, and I have never done this, that you could use the system() command in php and just use adduser. At least to add a user. After that I believe that user and pass combinations are stored in a file, I think in /etc/passwrds or something like that. The biggest security risk would be to then have write and read access from the script to the filesystem.