Access document through remote firewall?

[Dean J. Garrett]

I have a site which offers documents (.doc, .pdf, etc.) for download. The
user clicks on the link and is able to download the file or open it. What if
the source location of the document is behind a firewall of a remote server
(i.e. not the server running the ASP application)? How can the link be
configured in such a way so that security parameters are passed to the
firewall to authenticate the access. This must be seamless to the user, i.e.
they mustn't know there's any authentication happening behind the scenes.

Any thoughts are welcome!

 

[Chris Barber]

Use an ASP link where the ASP page goes and gets the document (ADODB.Stream
or whatever) according to a querystring or form post value and then returns
it as a binary stream with appropriate http headers.
How you get it [the document] to the ASP page on the webserver when the
document is behind a firewall etc. is entirely up to you.

Chris.

I have a site which offers documents (.doc, .pdf, etc.) for download. The
user clicks on the link and is able to download the file or open it. What if
the source location of the document is behind a firewall of a remote server
(i.e. not the server running the ASP application)? How can the link be
configured in such a way so that security parameters are passed to the
firewall to authenticate the access. This must be seamless to the user, i.e.
they mustn't know there's any authentication happening behind the scenes.

Any thoughts are welcome!

 

[Dean J. Garrett]

Thanks for your response. I guess the main issue is how this technique will
allow the requester to be authenticated with the firewall in order to
provide access to the document.

 

[Chris Barber]

The requester [eg. client] won't have to [authenticate] - that's the
responsibility of the ASP server-side code - presumably using the XMLHTTP
method may work unless Microsoft's url 'fix' has broken it.

Chris.

Thanks for your response. I guess the main issue is how this technique will
allow the requester to be authenticated with the firewall in order to
provide access to the document.