I have a Solaris box running Apache 1.3.26 that uses mod_auth_external to restrict access to certain directories. This module allows me to pass the username & password to an external program (hence the name) in order to authenticate the user. I have a large number of users and using regular htaccess password files is not practical.

My problem is this: I store my user accounts in MySql and want to use a Perl/DBI script as the password checker. However, when the perl program is invoked by the mod_auth_external module, it does not inherit the web server's environment variables. Without the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable set to include "/usr/local/mysql/lib", the DBI connection fails every time because it cannot find the libmysqlclient.so files. I have tried setting the environment variable in my httpd.conf file and in the script itself like this:

$ENV{'LD_LIBRARY_PATH'} = '/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/mysql/li
+b';
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but from what I understand you cannot change an environment variable after the script has been executed.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this? I would prefer to simply call a single perl program and not have to call one program to set an ENV variable, then call another to actually run the DBI:mysql call. Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Thanks.