Hi,
I'm running Apache2 with Tomcat 5.5 (Java 1.4) on Freebsd 5.3, and I'll need to find a way to authenticate against a Oracle 9i database (running elsewhere). Did you have any similar experiences? I'm out of options at the moment, and I really appreciate any help. Here's what I've tried:
1: mod_auth_oracle
There isn't a FreeBSD port, thus I had to compile it from source, with oracle-instant-client libraries from freebsd port. Since it requires linux-compatibility library, even though I have successfully compiled the module with gmake, it always result in apache core dumps. Thus I guess mix and matching bsd libraries and linux compatibility libraries is a dead-end. I've tried the freebsd-question mailing list but I don't get any answers. (please see
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=646936+0+current/freebsd-questions for the setup details).
2: mod_auth_radius + freeradius with oracle support
Attempted it but it seems to be too complicated and overkill to setup a freeradius server just for this simple authentication task, thus I decided against it.
3: mod_auth_any and mod_auth_external with external authenticator
I've also tried to combine an external authenticator written in Java using JDBC oracle connection, with the above two modules. mod_auth_any was too lacking in documentation and I didn't get it to work. mod_auth_external worked but JDBC connection is too slow to be used in any production environment (~3s per authentication request!! the delay goes up all the way to 5 minutes if there's 100 requests per second!! ). Tried combining with mod_authencache, and it didn't seem to make much difference.
I suppose my remaining option would probably involving in writing a custom shell script or perl script that calls sqlplus (which works in fbsd with linux libs, btw) to authenticate, then plug that in; however that does seem to be too much work and far too insecure way to accomplish this task. Although I didn't find it - is there any ready-made perl5 oracle authentication module that already works on Freebsd? Do you know any success stories for setting up apache authentication against oracle in Freebsd? What other options would you have?
Many thanks for all your help.
Cheers,
HH
