Authentication - directory trailing slash

[jfrankman]

I have configured an Apache Server instance (running on an IBM iSeries) to authenticate users via Kerberos. I did this so our users would not have to sign into the web site if they were signed into the network. It works fine except that if you remove the last forward slash from the URL, either a user is prompted for a user name and password, or s/he simply gets a 403 Forbidden. In other words:

This works (user is authenticated via kerberos):
[example...]

But this does not work (user is prompted for domain, username, and password.):
[example...]

I thought this could be solved with aliases and/or redirects, but I have not had any success. Here is a snippent of my conf.httpd file that I think applies to this problem. You should see that I have two alias' one with, and one without a trailing slash. I also got desparate and created a second directory without a trailing slash:

Alias /ThinkingInJava/ /www/example_p/htdocs/ThinkingInJava/
Alias /ThinkingInJava /www/example_p/htdocs/ThinkingInJava/

#Thinking In Java Documentation
<Directory /www/example_p/htdocs/ThinkingInJava>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow From all
</Directory>

<Directory /www/example_p/htdocs/ThinkingInJava/>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow From all
</Directory>

Any thoughts, ideas, or wild guesses would be appreciated.

[edited by: jatar_k at 10:40 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2006]
[edit reason] generalized [/edit]