I am to be having a lot of problems, misinformation and confusion when attempting to find out the plausibility and viability of attempting this.
The requirement is for a remote client, accessing our website to be auto signed in with their Active Directory User account.
We have the option to setup a WCF service (or something similar) on their remote server for authentication purposes. Which from my little understanding is how this problem will be tackled.
So, my question after a little background is this.
CAN this be done, and HOW can it be done?
Instead of hosting a WCF service on their domain, I would look into installing ADFS on their domain.
You can change your website to accept security tokens from ADFS using the WS-Federation protocol. You can use classes from the System.IdentityModel namespace for that. An example of how to implement this in ASP.NET can be found here.
An alternative would be to use Azure Active Directory as your identity provider and have your client sync accounts to their AAD directory (or federate between AAD and ADFS). An example can be found here.
I have the following problem to solve:
I few months ago I startet a website where you can watch youtube videos which aren't available in your country. Everythings works fine but now I want to offer a new method where I route all the requests directly over my server. Therefore I will later use a custom DNS-Server. Right now I use the hosts file for testing but I have really no idea how i can identify the user. I can promp the user user to login on a website but I will that it works systemwide so if he use a youtube downloader for example it have to work there either and not only in the browser where I could use a session system with cookies. I want a solution where the user can identify himself once in a time like a website or something like this but how can my server detect if this is a user which is logged in or if he is not?
There are several ways that this could be accomplished with varying levels of difficulty.
standard proxy server over https. Your service could simply be a proxy server and then every "client" would update their browser to point to your proxy server. You could also simplify this by using a proxy PAC file (proxy auto config).
An anonomyzing interface. The end user would not be able to use their standard search tools etc, instead they would have to use a web page much like what google translate does.
A browser plugin. There are already firefox plugins which do something similar to this. They change the way that the browser resolves DNS. This may be the best bet for you but would require development work.
An actual install utility that you have your users install on their machines which update the dns servers.
I'd like to have my Scala application server find out if it's running inside Heroku or CloudBees or Cloud Foundry or something else. Is there some standard way of finding out which Java hosting provider is currently in use? (if any)
Perhaps the hosting provider's firewall/load-balancer/whatever adds some standard HTTP header that the app server could check? Or perhaps it's possible to do hosting provider specific checks somehow, for the most popular hosting providers?
Background: The app server could then show helpful tips to the server admin that tells him/her how to view the server's log files. This would be useful during the initial setup of the server + database, because then the admin needs to find a certain magic password in the log file, which s/he then uses to get access to the admin interface web pages the very first time (before any admin user exists in the database, see this security question). — The installation would be more user-friendly, if the server could tell the admin exactly how to view the log files (which varies from hosting provider to hosting provider).
In the case of cloudbees there are several ways, none of which are guaranteed to be future proof (given changing containers).
Perhaps what is needed is a standard environment variable to make this doable.
I have little cPanel web server that I offer as a convenient addition to my web development/design services to my clients.
All of them use roundcube when accessing their webmail so it would be good to skip cpanel's mail app selection page.
I know how to do it for a single account by creating subdomain webmail.domainname.com and redirecting it to roundcube, but I'd like to know if there's a way to do it for all accounts on a server, instead of doing it manually.
I have a site i am working on that i would like to display only to a few others for now. Is there anything wrong with setting up windows user names and using windows auth to prompt the user before getting into the development site?
There are several ways, with varying degrees of security:
Don't put it on the internet - put it on a private network, and use a VPN to access it
Restrict access with HTTP authentication (as you suggest). The downside to this is it can interfere with the actual site, if you are using HTTP auth, or some other type of authentication as part of the application.
Restrict access based on remote IP. Just allow the IPs of users you want to be able to access it.
Use a custom hostname. Have it on a public IP, but don't publish the hostname. This means make an entry in your HOSTS file (or configure your own DNS server, if possible) so that "blah.mysite.com" goes to the site, but that is not available on the internet. Obviously you'd only make the site accessible when using that hostname (and not the IP).
That depends on what you mean by "best": for example, do you mean "easiest" or "most secure"?
The best way might be to have it on a private network, which you attach to via VPN.
I do this frequently. I use Hamachi to allow them to access my dev box so they can see whats going on. they have access to it when they want , and/or when I allow. When they are done I evict them from my Hamachi network and change the password.
Hamachi is a software VPN. Heres a link to Hamachi - AKA LogMeIn
Hamachi
They have a free version which works quite well.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with Windows auth. There are couple of (not too big) drawbacks, though:
your website auth scheme is different from the final product.
you are giving them more access to the box they really need.
you automatically reimaging the machine and redeploying the website is more complex, as you have to automate the windows account creation.
I would suggest two alternatives:
to do whatever auth you plan on doing in the final website and make sure all pager require auth
do a token cookie based auth - send them a link that sets a particular token in a cookie and in your website code add quick check for that token before you even go to the regular user auth
If you aren't married to IIS, and you need developers to be able to change the content, I would consider Apache + SSL + WebDav (aka Web Folders). This will allow you to offer a secure sandbox where developers can change and view the content without having user accounts on the server.
This setup requires some knowledge of Apache so it only makes sense if you are already using Apache or if you frequently need to provide outsiders access to your web server.
First useful link I found on the topic: http://pascal.thivent.name/2007/08/howto-setup-apache-224-webdav-under.html
Why don't you just set up an NTFS user and assign it to the website (and remove anonymous access)