AuthPals: ActiveX DLL to Authenticate Access Accounts

9/9/05: We have stopped distributing this software as noted below. Support is still planned to be in place through July 5, 2006. At 23:59 on 7/5/06 it will stop working.

5/2/05: The announced phase-out of PSU Gina does also mean that AuthPals will stop working July 5, 2006.

7/22/04: The Penn State WebAccess service has been announced. As soon as the developer's guide is ready, and it appears to be working smoothly, we will stop distributing AuthPals. It will, however, continue to be supported for at least another year.

Quick links:

Introduction

AuthPals is an ActiveX DLL for verifying a Penn State Access Account userid and password using PALS (Page Accounting and Login Server) to do the work. The advantages of using this method is ease of coding and installation. Neither Kerberos or DCE has to be installed. During the transition from Kerberos 4, PALS tried Kerberos 4 if DCE failed; currently it verifies passwords against win.psu.edu, and if that fails for any reason, it uses DCE.

What It Does

The Authentication method returns true if the password is correct for that userid, false if it is wrong or there was an error. Various properties can be retrieved to determine why the password verification failed.

Download and Install

No longer.

Support

We do not provide programming support for using the dll; the package comes with a sample Visual Basic program doing CGI.

Note that the current version is 2.15, and is named AuthPals215.dll, put out 12/18/01. If you have an older version you must upgrade because the Pals server names changed. You want to be sure the dll will try the right backup addresses if the primary fails.

Note also that this service is really an interim solution, and we very much hope there will soon be one (or more) "better" ways (as easy but more robust) for IIS to control access via PSU Access Accounts.

Firewalls

There have been problems reported (12/2003) with clients (servers using AuthPals) behind firewalls. Some details are here.

Outages

We have a separate page on what to do if Pals doesn't reply.

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This page was last modified: 7/5/2006 8:42:53 AM.