OK, that starts to work ... now the cookie doesn't seem to get set correctly.

but that also means that the docs are fubar. grrr.

EDIT:after checking the error_log, the cookie is getting set with an expiration date in the past, which is obviously an invalid cookie...

EDIT2:invalid cookie was invalid password. with the right password, i get:

access to /home/httpd/htdocs/protected/index.html failed for 10.0.0.50
+, reason: file permissions deny server execution
[download]

file permissions are OK ....

[root@machine protected]# ls -al
total 12
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Mar  4 16:24 .
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         4096 Mar  8 10:31 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           31 Mar  4 16:24 index.html
[download]

the stupid Q: *what* file permissions?

programming's hard. let's go shopping!