Virtual Website Problems

[Aart Koelewijn]

On Tue, 12 May 2009 12:26:26 +0200, Carl Friis-Hansen wrote:

> Erasmus, P, Mnr <perasmus at sun.ac.za> wrote:
>> Hi There,
>>  
>> I am running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, as a virtual apache server. I have
>> about 10 websites running from this machine. One of my websites, I have
>> setup access control with an .htaccess file. My problem is that on the
>> local network I can access the website and login, but from outside it
>> does not want to work. In my apache log I get the following message.
>>  
>> Wed May 06 10:02:38 2009] [error] [client 41.208.11.176] user test:
>> authentication failure for "/example/test/example": Password Mismatch
>>  
>> My password on the website has a few special characters, when removing
>> the characters it work fine from outside. Password characters &!@. I
>> just want to know how is it that when using this characters in my
>> password, the website does not want to work from the outside of my
>> network. But it still works from inside.
> 
> I would also expect the transfer of the password to be the same whatever
> interface it came from.  So my guess is that the authentication files
> are acquired from different locations when coming from one interface
> rather than another interface.  Have a look at what the access.log says
> both when successful and when unsuccessful.

I think this has to do with the character encoding. It may be that html 
encoding is used and not expected, or is not used and expected when 
trying to login from the outside. For standard characters this will not 
be a problem but for special characters like & and @ this may create a 
problem.

Aart