Hi,
I was wondering if anyone knows of a web application that is soley used for authenticating users. Several web applications come with authentication crippled if you're using the free version and you have to pay for authentication + other features. A good example of this is Splunk. The free version can index about 500 MB worth of syslog every day. However, it comes with no user authentication, so anyone that knows the IP and port can access your Splunk/syslog-ng server. Of course, I can try to prevent this by using iptables, etc. but I would prefer to add an authentication page. What I was thinking of is a small web application that I can define usernames + passwords (permissions aren't important) and only after the user is authenticated from this web page will they be redirected to the Splunk console. Any ideas? Does anyone know of such an authentication application? Thanks for your help.

PS. Ideally, I should purchase the enterprise version, but it currently stands at $5000, which is out of budget. So at least for the time being, I would like a workaround that would provide me with better security. Thanks.

I'm not a 100% certain I get what you're trying to achieve...

What is the website (which server are you using) you want authentication for?

Splunk (I never used it, just had a look the freshmeat announcement) appears
to be a search engine, not a generic authentication engine?

If you want a free CMS with backend-database support and authentication
features, have a good look at Zope/Plone.


Cheers,
Tink

Hi Tinkster,
I'll try to clarify. Splunk (and some other projects) remove the authentication page from their free versions. So you set up their web application and you get it to listen on a network port (eg. 80, 8080, 8000, whatever). What I'm trying to do is try to compensate for Splunk's limitation by seeing if there is any wrapper or web application that I can also start that will give me the authentication part that has been crippled in the free version of Splunk. All I need is the authentication part to add a little security to the setup (so you at least have to know a valid username/password combination before accessing it). Hope the picture's clearer now. Thanks.

Hey There LinuxGeek,

You are right about that. In order to drive sales, splunk has killed auth in the free version... but other than that it is still a pretty full featured free application.

I'd recommend following the directions posted by this blogger to utilize apache's built in http auth system (assuming you are using apache).
It's my first post, so they won't let me post a url...
but if you go to the website deckerd.com, and then put in the path /splunk-free-htaccess-protection-using-apache/ (or search google for site:deckerd.com splunk free htaccess) you should find the posting.

If not, post back here, and it will be my second post so i'll be able to post the url :P

Good luck, and enjoy splunking.

Thanks benstraw. Looks like just what I was looking for. Thanks again and welcome to the forums