UIDs and servers

**mpnordland** · August 9th, 2011

Hi,
I have the singular necessity of getting the user identifier of the user accessing my server. I am writing this myself, it is intended to be a local server. However, I need to strictly differentiate between users, with out the users themselves being involved. Also, all of this needs to happen through a browser. I would appreciate any tips.

**Bachstelze** · August 9th, 2011

Define 'accessing'.

**karlson** · August 9th, 2011

Originally Posted by mpnordland

Hi,
I have the singular necessity of getting the user identifier of the user accessing my server. I am writing this myself, it is intended to be a local server. However, I need to strictly differentiate between users, with out the users themselves being involved. Also, all of this needs to happen through a browser. I would appreciate any tips.

I'm kinda confused as to what exactly you are trying to do... From what I can gather from your post you can do this easily with

Code:

$ last
$ w

or

Code:

$ who

If you need to do this in C, C++, Perl there is a

Code:

getuid()

function beyond this you need to be a little more specific.

**mpnordland** · August 10th, 2011

Ok, time to facepalm and remind myself of how to ask programming questions.
*facepalms*
Now that we've got that out of the way, The "server" is a local proxy server that tracks internet usage. The idea is to help people break internet addictions by emailing flagged urls to their partner of choice. The thing is, is that linux is a multi-user system, hence the need to differentiate between users so that we don't have embarrassing mix ups. To help the users stay accountable, it is necessary to hide all of the authentication from the user. It is also needful to make it difficult to masquerade as another user. And, since it is a proxy server, you have to figure out who the user is from the browser. Cookies may be an option, but I'd like a more fool proof way.

**mpnordland** · August 11th, 2011

bUMP

**karlson** · August 11th, 2011

Originally Posted by mpnordland

Ok, time to facepalm and remind myself of how to ask programming questions.
*facepalms*
Now that we've got that out of the way, The "server" is a local proxy server that tracks internet usage. The idea is to help people break internet addictions by emailing flagged urls to their partner of choice. The thing is, is that linux is a multi-user system, hence the need to differentiate between users so that we don't have embarrassing mix ups. To help the users stay accountable, it is necessary to hide all of the authentication from the user. It is also needful to make it difficult to masquerade as another user. And, since it is a proxy server, you have to figure out who the user is from the browser. Cookies may be an option, but I'd like a more fool proof way.

I have to ask what proxy server are you using? Squid probably will give you the information you need. I don't know if you will need more than that.

**mpnordland** · August 11th, 2011

I'm writing my own for various reasons, the primary one being that I need to hand off the urls to another process. What I'm looking for is the user id, or the user name of whoever owns the browser process that is connecting to my proxy server.

**Barrucadu** · August 11th, 2011

As the browser will be connecting to the proxy server via a network (even if run on the same computer), you can't just get the UID. You could differentiate between users based on their IP or user-agent (or one of the plethora of other headers).