[Zope3-Users] Re: NTLM credential plugin

[Chris Withers]

Gary Poster wrote:
> http://www.innovation.ch/personal/ronald/ntlm.html), the problem is that 
> the 4 way handshake has to happen *within a single connection*.  
> Apparently MS abuses HTTP to perform this.

Hmmm, I'm not sure this is true. One project I work on has 10,000+ users 
a day authenticating via NTLM and I'm not convinced we maintain an http 
connection for the whole dance.

Where you will run into problems is if you have a high volume of users. 
The DCs can be slow to respond and so you end up with lots of app server 
threads tied up waiting for them. Since Zope has a limited number of 
threads, this is an issue. Someone on the project is currently building 
a mod_python thingy to do this auth and bounce back with a cookie that 
Zope then trusts since Apache can spawn off new threads at will...

cheers,

Chris

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