How to setup Apache authentication against Oracle 9i in FreeBSD?

Hi gheist,

Thanks a lot for your reply.  I am aware that there is no native oracle drivers available for FreeBSD.  However, the recent oracle instant client (10.1) does indeed work on Freebsd - there's even its port in the ports tree!  That client is dependent on the Linux compatibility libraries, hence I was unable to compile anything that depends on it, apart using the included sqlplus in the original linux ELF binary form.  So maybe one other option is to compile an authenticator in Linux ELF format, and run it in bsd in compatibility mode, then hook it to mod_auth external.

As for LDAP, I still see it as an overkill for apache authentication.  Java virtual machine setup and teardown is far too much of an overhead for reducing TCP waiting time to have any significance.  However I'm still pounding on the option to build a bespoke java servlet just to do the authentication, thus reducint the need to invoke java everytime, and can do some caching as well.  What would you think?

Cheers.

What has Java emulator and Linux emulator to do with FreeBSD system ???
Probably Linux with Java and Apache is answer to your questions.

Java was used to connect to oracle.  I've compiled native fbsd java binaries, and used that to write a java class that uses jdbc-oracle to do the authentication checking against the oracle database.  

Oracle's instant client runs on Freebsd in Linux compatibility mode, and hence I was unable to compile any fbsd binaries/modules that depends on it.

Linux is out of the question as our servers are all FreeBSD based.

Then stop running unsupported databases....

am not very sure.. but a small clue..

if jdbc 's performance is not that fine.. then why can not be perl DBI and Oracle DBD tried..with a persistent connection !!

thanks ..

beause it is linux and windows library of your choice.

Thanks for your replies.  I tried a shell wrapper around sqlplus, and managed to get ~20 requests per second (that's 10 faster than jdbc).  That's also 10x slower than mod_auth_oracle that I've tried on a linux box (~200 requests per second) - and even slower than mod_auth_mysql (~400 requests per second).

I don't know much about perl, but I'll give DBD-Oracle a try.  However, how would I plug that into apache?  Is there any module that does it?  If I am to hook the perl script with the mod_auth_external again, I don't know how a connection can be persistent as a new process is forked everytime mod_auth_external does a lookup.