So, Chuck, over at Cobra wanted to get his trac site up and running and was wondering about using the exisiting accounts that people had in the phpBB3 forums. Trac being Python, and phpBB being, obviously, PHP, there was no stock way of accomplishing this.

First, Trac's authentication meme is basically: get someone else to do it. Generally speaking, this is the web server. That's all fine and dandy, but some people want a bit more. Thankfully, Matt Good wrote the Account Manager plugin. This neat little plugin lets you auth against the trac db, htpasswd files, htdigest files, etc. It also allows for easier management of accounts. The most wonderful thing about it, however, is the IPasswordStore interface it defines. This little beauty lets you auth against just about anything where the input is a username and password.

Well, amazingly, phpBB manages to authenticate users via a username and password. Graciously, Cobra sponsored me to write up an IPasswordStore implementation to use the existing phpBB database as the authentication store for the adjoining Cobra trac site. Hence the birth of PhpBbAuthPlugin. So, for all you phpBB junkies that need to run Trac sites, you now have an option where with you can keep your accounts one and the same.

Hey, phpBB guys, don't you think that 73 columns in your user table is a bit excessive?

Let's establish some facts.

• MS SQL Server 2005 allows the sa password to be longer than 15 characters.
• MS Windows XP allows a password longer than 15 characters.

Given these two facts, one would assume that Microsoft has a policy of allowing arbitrary length password (or at least really long ones). However, if one were to assume this, one would be wrong.

Microsoft's Business Solutions - Great Plains 8 does NOT allow passwords longer than 15 characters. I'll admit that GP8 is a bit out of date. It was released in 2003, I believe. But, really, was there a need to limit password lengths in 2003? I don't think so.

Once again, thank you Microsoft for such a wonderful piece of software. If anyone is considering Microsoft Dynamics:GP (as it is now called), save yourself the misery and check out HansaWorld or some other product instead.

DIAF