Greetings, (This is crossposted because it is a product anouncement, and contains interesting developer pointers) I've have massaged the source code for UserDb and created a new user folder products called etcUserFolder. This products authenticates off of a flat file of usernames:cryptedpasswords. If there is anything trailing the crypted password it is ignored, so any /etc/passwd file will work. It is generaly not recommended, however, to use your /etc/passwd file for security reasons. This is an unsuported product and has been written because it was asked for a few times, and I felt the community could use another good example of writing user folders. It also shows off cookie authentication which Brian perfected with UserDb. Here is the documentation: etcUserFolder requires a directory called 'etcUsers' in which to place your file containing the uid:pwd pairs. This directory may be an INSTANCE_HOME (typicaly your top level Zope dir), SOFTWARE_HOME (typicaly 'lib/python') or in the etcUserFolder directory. Jim wrote a nifty function called getPath that sniffs all of these places for a directory and file of your choosing. This function is included in etcUserFolder and will be included as a standard function of the next release. Other Product authors may find it interesting. Since the flat file is meant to be b/w compatable with /etc/passwd and htpasswd style files, there is no Role associated with the users it authenticates. You can specify a default role which is, by default, 'etcUser'. I have not done extensive testing of this, therefore it is a pre-release. Please send bug-reports and hopefully a patch to me (michel@digicool.com) http://www.zope.org/Download/Prereleases/etcUserFolder/etcUserFolder.tar .gz -Michel