I am looking to control access to some large files (we’re talking many GB here) by the use of signed URLs. The files are currently restricted by LDAP Basic authentication (mod_auth_ldap), but I need to change this to verify the signature (passed as a query parameter in the URL).
Basically, I just need to run a script to verify the signature, and allow the request to proceed as if authentication had succeeded. My initial thought to this was just to use a simple CGI script, but as the files are so large I’m concerned about performance. So, really, this question is (probably) more like “are there any performance implications of streaming large files from a CGI script via Apache?”… and if so, “is there a better way of doing this (short of writing a dedicated authentication module)?”
If this makes any sense, help would be much appreciated 🙂
P.S. I wasn’t sure exactly what to search for for this (10 minutes of Googling were fruitless), so I may very well be duplicating someone else’s post.
I ended up solving this with a CGI script as mentioned… cookies weren’t an option because we need to be able to support clients that don’t use cookies (apt).