user authentication, using php

MHz

Hello, I have a problem.
I have a LAN with one webserver and one Mac OS X server
On the MacOS X server, there are some users registred.

On my webserver, I have a PHP page with a form where to enter username and password which is reachable from the internet. My problem is: I want a PHP script from my webserver to send a "question" to the OS X server and ask if that user and password is valid. I just need this authentication. If the users exists, he will be able to log in on the PHP page and enter a secur page.

My question is: Is this possible and if so, how do I set it up?

ednark

php has full [man]socket[/man] support... so anything that the osX server is listening for can be asked by php...

but i don't know how to talk osX

you need to know the local ip of the osx server
what port you allowed to ask about users on
the call you need to ask about a user

MHz

I know port and IP, thats not a problem.

The problem is, how does these sockets work?
Does anyone know how to communicate with an OS X-server with PHP?

ednark

shit... i dunno how to explain sockets from ground up... ummm...

a socket is a two way communicator between two seperate processes on a computer... or on seperate computers....

you open up an internet socket and specify the ip address and port...
you are left with a varible representing the socket...
you can use the socket functions to write data to it and read data from it... text or otherwise

anything you write to it gets sent to the other computer... anything read from it has come from that other computer...

everytime your browser grabs a webpage it's creating a socket from your browser to the webserver of choice sendin your page request, and reading the html back from the socket if and when the server replies...

the specifics are a lot more complicated... so unless you want to learn a lot of arbitrary specifics of socket programming, id try for some other method...

even if you know how to make them talk... you still need to know exactly the bits the osX server is waiting to hear which ask it to validate a user... and execatly the bits it will use to reply... i doubt it uses ascii text, but it might...