Hello,
my flat-text htpasswd file gets corrupted around every 10 days.
I've also tried the file as a dbm file, which did not resolve the problem.

My site also gets brute-forced heavily.

Is it possible that the brute-force attacks are corrupting the file? I heard that Linux will throttle back resources when the processor is on a heavy load, which might result in the corruption.

Other than that, I can only figure that the file is not always flocked when a routine is writing to the file, which I'm researching now.

Typically, the file gets truncated at some random position in the file.

thanks for any ideas,

Gordie

Couple of quick ideas - try making it read only to EVERYBODY (so permissons of 444) - so that nobody can change it...this is assuming your web page doesn't change it. Second is to possibly use a different form of authentication - such as php (+mysql as needed) - it is a mite bit slower, but you'll be waiting for user input either way.

Have fun,
Chris