Question

I'm running TWiki on Windows XP with IIS 5.1, and everything works nicely except the user authentication. Everybody is known as Main.TWikiGuest. Hasn't anybody successully solved this -- on public Internet, not on a LAN intranet?

I've read practically all twiki.org topics that mention IIS or authentication in any way, but I didn't find the solution yet. The documentation pages and support pages usually suggest to use the intranet logon or the Windows domain's validation. My TWiki is a stand-alone server on the public Internet, so of course anything LAN- or domain-based won't work.

Twiki.org is set up the way I would like to get this Windows+IIS setup too: public access, users must register to edit, and anybody can register through the Internet (no server-side user administration required). TWiki on Apache relies on the file .htpasswd for this, but IIS does not use this file (and also not the httpd.conf ), so this complicates matters.

I'm attaching a print of the testenv.pl output as well as my lib/twiki.cfg file.

• TWiki version: 01Feb2003
• Perl version: ActiveState Perl 5.6.1
• Web server & version: IIS 5.1 in Windows XP.
• Server OS: Windows XP Professional US
• Web browser & version: Anything. Mine is IE6 and Mozilla 1.4.
• Client OS: Anything. Mine is Windows XP.
• not as intranet, but publicly on Internet, like twiki.org.
• not on corporate LAN, not having any domain controllers or LAN-based user administration.
• TWiki URL: http://twiki.no-ip.com
• testenv_output.htm: The testenv results.
• TWiki.cfg: The TWiki configuration.

-- TorbenGB - 27 May 2003

Answer

I can't really help with IIS as I don't use it - you would need to re-write the register script to work with IIS somehow, which could be somewhat challenging (might need to use Win32 APIs via ActivePerl - just guessing really).

Thanks for the detail, though - as a result I have done a minor fix to testenv to remove the bogus $scriptUrlPath message. IIS doesn't set REQUEST_URI so the script now says that this setting can't be checked due to this limitation. Available in CVS at CVSget:bin/testenv.

-- RichardDonkin - 27 May 2003

So you're saying that my choices are to a) rewrite parts of TWiki so that it can run on IIS, or b) switch to Apache instead? Well, given those choices I think I'll go for Apache. The first choice reqiures a great deal of programming knowledge about TWiki that I don't (yet) have. Thank you for your analysis.

Can it really be that nobody ever tried this before? Or merely that all IIS installations so far have been on LAN/intranet?

-- TorbenGB - 28 May 2003

I think it's probably the latter, but check TWikiInstallations. I'll update TWikiSystemRequirements to reflect this issue - apart from register you can do a public TWiki on IIS, it's just not very easy Hand-registration of users would be possible as long as IIS supports HTTP Basic Authentication for non-IE web browsers.

-- RichardDonkin - 28 May 2003

Okay, I've now changed from using Win+IIS to Win+Apache as my web server instead. (Incidentally, I have two Apache setup issues that I couldn't figure out by myself...)

-- TorbenGB - 31 May 2003