htaccess password protection on Godaddy

standard options aren't working

[varya]

'kay, I'm kinda going nuts with this. I'm working on a site for a client and they must have a password protected member area. I thought this would be an easy thing to accomplish. Sure is on every other host I've worked on.

Not so with Godaddy. I'm watching my hourly rate go into negative figures with all the time I've wasted researching a work around. At one point, I did get htaccess to block the directory, but it wouldn't let me log in.

I also tried phpaccess, but that didn't work either.

This is the htaccess file

AuthUserFile /home/content/u/s/e/username/html/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Member Area"
AuthType Basic

<limit GET POST>
require valid-user
</limit>

That should work, but isn't. Either the directory remains completely accessible, or I can get it locked off, but can't log in.

Does godaddy cache htaccess files? Do I need to use special encryption for the htpasswd file? I've tried about four different tools. Nothing's worked yet.

One thing's for sure, I'm writing it into my contract that clients may not use Godaddy for hosting, or they have to upload and configure their sites themselves. ;-)

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[jdMorgan]

> Either the directory remains completely accessible, or I can get it locked off, but can't log in.

Which case does the code above represent?

Jim

[varya]

All of them.

It didn't restrict access. I re-uploaded it after generating a new htpasswd file and it protected the directory, but I couldn't log in.

I deleted them and tried PHPAccess, which generates it's own htaccess and htpasswd files. Those didn't protect the directory.

So I reloaded the original files, but the directory is still accessible.

Yes, I'm flushing cache, using different browsers, and sometimes different 'puters and the problem persists.

This is why I'm wondering if Godaddy caches the htaccess files...it would explain why they suddenly start working.

Can't figure out why I can't log in when I do manage to protect the directory, though.

[jdMorgan]

If you can't log in with that code in place, then that means the code is working, and that your password is incorrect (assuming that your username is correct).

In most cases, it is *required* that you use the htpasswd password-generation utility provided by the server itself to genrerate the passwords, as the 'seed' value is unique to each server (well, more or less)... Poke around in the control panel, or use SSH to log in and run htpasswd. See [httpd.apache.org...]

Jim