Passing Windows username to PHP (no IIS)

Anon

I am developing an intranet site at the school where I work, and really need to get the windows username passed to PHP, so that I can customise the pages depending on who is logged on. Having seperate logins for the intranet is not an option - as the pupils have difficulty enough remembering their network logon details - plus it isnt secure enough.

I have found a way of doing this but it requires NT clients and an IIS server, but we run Win98 clients and Apache.

We already run Identd on all the clients to pass the usernames to our squid proxy server. Is there anyway to use a similar technique to get the username in to PHP.

Because its on the intranet, there isnt a problem running a piece of software on the clients to pass the name to PHP.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Intraclast

emcb_php

Hi,

You can just get the username like this:

<?php

echo "User = $HTTP_ENV_VARS["USERNAME"}";

Elfyn

jesus_hairdo

I think that only works if some sort of authentication has been used by the web server, either .htaccess on apache or by the NT user only setting on IIS.

Anon

thanks for the suggestion, but I couldnt get it to work. I don't think that the USERNAME is part of the array in $HTTP_ENV_VARS, certainly it doesn't appear when I do phpinfo().

Any other ideas?

Thanks

Intraclast

jesus_hairdo

to be honest you might come up against a brick wall. I've been trying to find this out for months and have had no success. The only idea i came up with was to get them to log in to the intranet page once and then store the details in a cookie with a long life span. I couldn't do this at my site cos cookies aren't stored with our user profiles.
If you get any where with this i wouldn't mind knowing too.

cheers

Jamie

jesus_hairdo

can i just ask, how did you manage to get your Squid proxy to access the usernames??
BTW what os are you using for the apache server, is it linux? what distro ?
I'm just wondering if there's a way to get PHP to mirror the effect of the squid proxy

Anon

I didnt set it up, but as I understand it you have to have Identd (and indent server) running on the client machines, which broadcasts the ident using the RFC 1413 standard. Squid proxy server can pick this up. So when you look at the access.log the username is shown with each record.

Identd can be downloaded here: http://identd.sourceforge.net/

The proxy is running on a Linux box running Mandrake 8.0

Hope this helps

Intraclast