How to get the username, without login prompt?

[Ghazan Haider]

I am posting this for the lack of a better newsgroup, and for the
knowledge of people here, and because its only partially OT.

We have a bunch of users with their computers at work. There are
reports that the users need, which could be in html, php, asp, jsp,
whatever.

Now I am trying to eliminate the login window entirely. In an html
request, the client (firefox, ie, etc) sends the clients hostname, IP,
a bunch of other stuff, but never the username. If the server-side
scripts could know which user is logged in, it could display only the
reports that user has access to. Ideally the process should work
across browsers... else I could compile firefox to send the username
in the header somewhere...

So I ask all the skilled developers here, this intriguing question.
How do you pass the username to the server without the login prompt???

Ideas:
(1) A fixed cookie
(2) ActiveX somehow.
(3) An applet is loaded that somehow gets the username, and the page
redirects in 1 sec, sending the username to the server.
(4) Firefox compiled to somewhere in the header include the username
(5) An initial page that runs an applet or something, that puts the
username into a cookie, and the page redirects in 1 sec, sending the
cookie
Is there any programming language, api, COM (Activex? applets?) or
other method to do this cleanly??

will it work if I exclusively use IIS and IE instead of firefox and
apache?

[Gordon Burditt]

>I have a similiar problem: I need to know the local IP / MAC adress of

the client from which the user logs on,
You can't know the MAC address unless the client is on the same
wire as the server. Otherwise what you get is the MAC address of
your router.

You can know the public IP address of the client as $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
but this may be the public IP address of a proxy, NAT gateway, etc.
and it's not guaranteed that this address will stay the same between
one web request and the next (e.g. load-balanced proxies).

Also, do you realize how many machines out there have the local IP
address of 192.168.1.1 ?
as the configuration of some
applications is dependent on the HW configuration (peripherals). the
What possible connection does either the MAC address or IP address
have to hardware configuration? Are you trying to collect an
inventory list of the location of hardware so you can steal it to
order or sell it to someone who does?
usual remote_addr thing does not work, as client in intranet or
internet (remote from home), webserver from where the application
runs is internet (1 client W98, all other XP, all IE). In a lot of js forums / docs I found statements that I can get ip /
mac with js / activex, but no reasonable info on how to. (what
happens on a notebook with LAN/WLAN nic?)

PHP runs on the SERVER, not the client. And it's exactly this sort
of crap with Javascript that makes people want to turn it off.

Gordon L. Burditt

[Peter Fox]

Following on from Ghazan Haider's message. . .

I am posting this for the lack of a better newsgroup, and for the
knowledge of people here, and because its only partially OT.

We have a bunch of users with their computers at work. There are
reports that the users need, which could be in html, php, asp, jsp,
whatever.

Now I am trying to eliminate the login window entirely. In an html
request, the client (firefox, ie, etc) sends the clients hostname, IP,
a bunch of other stuff, but never the username. If the server-side
scripts could know which user is logged in, it could display only the
reports that user has access to. Ideally the process should work
across browsers... else I could compile firefox to send the username
in the header somewhere...

I don't know, but would have thought that a multi-user PC would have
multiple 'profiles' for things like cookies, browser history etc. If
not IE then it is a feature I'd expect in /some/ browser.

--
PETER FOX Not the same since the bra business went bust
pe******@eminen t.demon.co.uk.n ot.this.bit.no. html
2 Tees Close, Witham, Essex.
Gravity beer in Essex <http://www.eminent.dem on.co.uk>