[Mediawiki-l] annoying authentications

[Michael Hufnagl]

Hi !

We have set up several Wikis in our company with different URLs.  The 
WIKI is secured via a
.htaccess file. At the first access Browser asks you to authenticate, 
which works. But then, browser asks again and again.
The number of authentication challenges seems to be dependent on the 
number of images which are embedded into a page.

So in worst cases there are up to 10 authentications necessary.

Interestingly only the first authentication leads to a HTTP FORBIDDEN 
response if failing. If one of the following
 challenges is cancelled, only some images arent loaded.

The symptoms come with any browser, with any user, logged in or not 
logged in. The symptoms increase if cache is cleared (because cached 
files have to be reloaded by the browser)

The configuration is

    * MediaWiki <http://www.mediawiki.org/>: 1.7.1
    * PHP <http://www.php.net/>: 5.2.0 (apache2handler)
    * MySQL <http://www.mysql.com/>: 5.0.33-log



A collegue told me that the problem  can relate to a special firewall 
configuration.

A misconfigured .htaccess file is possible too.

Has anybody noticed such a behavior and how did you solve it ?

regards

Michael