On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Roth, Kevin P. wrote:

> *However*, one of the points of supporting NTLM (for your windows clients
> anyways) is to *avoid* having to code usernames and passwords into our
> scripts. If curl fully supports NTLM, it should be able to use some kind of
> API calls to get the necessary information (I would hope anyways).

Ok, I see your point.

I see the support for NTLM mainly as one more way to authenticate against a
server, especially since there are many servers out there that require NTLM to
return any contents. To authenticate, you need to provide user and password
one way or another. If we can make curl extract that info using some magic on
Windows, then I'm all for discussing how it could be done. I'm just not the
man to make that happen.

I think an obvious benefit of using NTLM compared to Basic is that the user
name and password are not sent over the wire in plain text.

> The secondary point, of course, is to support authenticating to a server (or
> through a proxy server) that only accepts NTLM-style credentials. That
> support I'm sure will be appreciated, but I was hoping for the first kind,
> mentioned above.

(First, I'll make it clear that we do not yet support NTLM for proxy
authentications and I don't think it'll work in 7.10.6 either.)

I don't think of the first point as an NTLM feature. You're basicly asking for
a way for curl to dig up the user and password from the operating system
somehow, and then let curl be able to use them.

> Has this been left out on purpose? Is there any discussion (on the lib-curl
> list perhaps) I could peruse to understand why?

This has not been discussed at all, and thus it has been left out without
purpose. Possibly because the NTLM implementation hasn't been discussed very
much at all...

> (Before you ask, I have no idea HOW to implement this, so I can't be of any
> assistance in making this work better...)

Neither can I in fact.

-- 
 Daniel Stenberg -- curl: been grokking URLs since 1998
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