[Mediawiki-l] Authentication

[Soriano, Melissa]

Hi Mediawiki folks,

I am trying to set up authentication for our existing wiki against an external database.  I currently do this successfully for my subversion database using Apache's mod_auth_pam module.  For our wiki, I would like to use a similar approach.  I tried to use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:HttpAuth.  Does this make sense?

I am using
MediaWiki          1.14.0
PHP                        5.2.6-1+lenny3 (apache2handler)
MySQL                 5.0.51a-24+lenny1

I downloaded the HttpAuth module, added the following lines to LocalSettings.php:

session_start();
 if ((!empty($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) && !empty($_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'])) || $_COOKIE['fpwiki_en_UserID']) {
        require_once("$IP/extensions/HttpAuthPlugin.php");
        $wgAuth = new HttpAuthPlugin();
        $wgHooks['UserLoadFromSession'][] = array($wgAuth,'autoAuthenticate');
 }

I then added the following lines to http.conf:
<Location /w/Special:UserLogin>
AuthType "basic"
AuthName "wiki"
AuthPAM_Enabled on
AuthPAM_FallThrough Off
SSLRequireSSL
Require valid-user
</Location>

The result is that when users visit Special:UserLogin, they get a pop-up screen and must authenticate using PAM.  They can then see the Special:UserLogin screen and must login again (which isn't compared to our external database).  This isn't quite what I wanted.  I am new to Apache and web administration.  Does anyone have any advice?

Thank you.

Regards,
Melissa Soriano