large volume htaccess and password administration

[wheel]

I'm working on a calculator that will eventually lead to needing 1000's and maybe 10's of thousands of people to login. Think employees of multiple large companies, that type of thing. Every employee has an individual login.

1) Are there any limitations on the size of the password file? Can I have 10K or more logins in one file without any performance issues?

2) And if so, are there any good tools to maintain this? i.e. I get a spreadsheet of user/passwords and I want to dump them into a password file? Or should I have this written custom?

3) Once logged in, can I call a program with the username info (i.e. as soon as they hit the page, it's personalized to them)?

4) can I have multiple password files in one htaccess file? i.e. can I have passwordfile1 and passwordfile2, and users from either file can get logged in? (this would allow me to keep logins from different companies in seperate files).

[wheel]

Actually, i think this isn't going to work. If an 'employee' logs in, can I tell which passwordfile they came in from? i.e. can I tell what company I should be directing them to?

Any thoughts on how to do that?

Employee A compnay A logs in, they go to calculator customized to their company.
Employee B company B logs in, they go to a calculator customized to a different company.

Looking to avoid having all the employees in one big database.

(This one, now resolved I think - I think I can do this through AuthGroupFile...i think).

[phranque]

if you are using php, this might be useful.
HTTP authentication with PHP:
http://php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php [php.net]

i've never used that but the equivalent in perl would probably be the Apache::AuthAny module.

[wheel]

Perfect! Thanks phranque.

I can just use a different program/url for each client then and a different password file. That'll fix it.