We've got a Linux box in the office which we want to use as a development server for all the sites for one of our clients. So using the .staging.local domain that I have set up on our Domain Controller I have set up a pile of sites, configured apache and it all works well eg http://site1.staging.local http://site2.staging.local etc etc example httpd.conf # http://site1.staging.local <VirtualHost *> ServerName site1.staging.local DocumentRoot "/var/www/site1.staging.local" <Directory /var/www/site1.staging.local/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> </VirtualHost> these all work brill. So next we want to give external access to these, but with some user authent. So I need to put them on different ports (the IT manager says so...) so for example http://clientName.ourDomain.com:[portnumber] so site1 external access httpd.conf looks like this Listen 7104 <VirtualHost *> ServerName clientName.ourDomain.com:7104 DocumentRoot "/var/www/site1.staging.local" <Directory /var/www/site1.staging.local/> Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews -Indexes AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all # external access user AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/.htpasswd AuthType Basic AuthName Protected Require user myUserName </Directory> </VirtualHost> now this seems to be working because when you hit http://clientName.myDomain.com:7104 it asks you to authenticate. I have created the user myUserName with the correct password using $root> htpasswd -b /etc/apache2/.htpasswd myUserName correctPassword as root on the Linux box. ok, so... when I put in myUserName/correctPassword for the un/pw it fails, the apache log says [Wed Oct 31 10:30:00 2007] [error] [client 192.168.4.1] access to / failed, reason: user myUserName not allowed access if I put in myUserName/crap for the un/pw it fails, the apache log says [Wed Oct 31 10:32:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.4.1] user myUserName: authentication failure for "/": Password Mismatch and if I put in complete/crap for the un/pw the apache log says [Wed Oct 31 11:05:46 2007] [error] [client 192.168.4.1] user complete not found: / so it seems that the authent is working its just that I haven't configured it to allow access to the folder by user myUserName but I thought that's what AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/.htpasswd AuthType Basic AuthName Protected Require user myUserName was supposed to do... any thoughts / suggestions welcomed? Thanks Greg