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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:11:25+00:00

I have a question that doesn’t need any specific answer, just a general direction

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I have a question that doesn’t need any specific answer, just a general direction of what to do. I work for a company that has many sites. Each site requires a login at some point. We have a single Accounts database that all of the sites hit.

One of the requirements for the login system is that if we login on one site, we should automatically be logged in elsewhere.

The way it works right now is that on page load (or init, forget which) at any of our sites (let’s say site1.com), it redirects to a “master” site (let’s say sitemaster.com). On sitemaster.com there is a web service which checks to see if a cookie exists on sitemaster.com for that user. If it does, it redirects back and lets site1.com know that the user has already logged in (site1.com then creates a cookie for site1.com so we don’t have to redirect to sitemaster.com in the future). If the user is not logged in at sitemaster.com, site1.com will then ask the user to login and, on submit, it redirects the user to sitemaster.com which logs them in, creates a cookie under sitemaster.com domain, redirects back to site1.com and lets site1.com know that the user is logged in (which then creates the cookie for site1.com).

On logout a similar method is employed.

Is this the best way of handling universal logins, or auto-logins across multiple sites? Is there a better way of doing things?

Some requirements:

  • Most of our sites are in .NET 2.0, but there are plans to update them all to .NET 4.0. We want the best method for this auto-login system so if something requires .NET 4.0, that’s ok.
  • The solution should not require javascript (our current solution requires javascript during the login process).
  • The solution should not require Flash.
  • It’s ok to use iframes, as long as javascript is not requred.
  • We would like to be able to do AJAX logins (using jQuery) without having the site refresh. The current solution, due to the redirects, prevents us from doing that. (eg: Pop up a modal box asking the user to login, and when they do, the modal box disappears and some content is changed, but no site refresh required). This isn’t absolutely necessary, but at the very least we should be able to verify a login using AJAX before any redirecting takes place.

Any articles or suggestions will be very helpful. I also have some questions related to the best way of re-using the auto-login code across sites (varying from ASP.NET 2.0 Forms to ASP.NET 4.0 MVC, but I’ll save that for another question).

Bara

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  1. Editorial Team

    At a simple level, your system works very much like OpenID. It might be worth implementing your own internal OpenID provider and save yourself all of the custom work and maintenance/bugfixes etc for a bespoke system. OpenID is supported by many many sites, including stackoverflow.com.

    http://openid.net/

    and

    http://wiki.openid.net/Run-your-own-identity-server

    which leads to:

    http://www.dotnetopenauth.net/

    -Oisin

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