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4.7.3 Gathering from password-protected servers

You can gather password-protected documents from HTTP and FTP servers. In both cases, you can specify a username and password as a part of the URL. The format is as follows:

         ftp://user:password@host:port/url-path
        http://user:password@host:port/url-path

With this format, the ``user:password'' part is kept as a part of the URL string all throughout Harvest. This may enable anyone who uses your Broker(s) to access password-protected documents.

You can keep the username and password information ``hidden'' by specifying the authentication information in the Gatherer configuration file. For HTTP, the format is as follows:

        HTTP-Basic-Auth: realm username password

where realm is the same as the AuthName parameter given in an NCSA httpd .htaccess file. In the CERN httpd configuration, the realm value is called ServerId.

For FTP, the format in the gatherer.cf file is

        FTP-Auth: hostname[:port] username password



Duane Wessels
Wed Jan 31 23:46:21 PST 1996