I want to develop an account management tool for my customers. I want the login screen to request their linux username/password (which they already have) and verify it on the server either by trying it via a script or in some other way. Can this be done??

I figured this would be the easiest way to implement the account management tool since it wouldn't require the creation of separate login details just for the account management tool.

Any help would be much appreciated!!!

THANKS! :)

Can't you just use a control panel for this?

Plesk does this

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

This is not for site management, rather for billing. I'm setting up a mysql database which will be used to update customer billing details, etc.

There is already a webcontrol pannel installed on my servers for site management.

You could use perl, and PAM. Or, if your control panel stores it's data in mysql db, it probably stores it's password there too.

Integrating two things is the toughest part of any software.... :(
The best way is to have a new database with username and password.
Then sychronise the password in the Linux box with the mysql on.
This would help I guess.
Pramming can be done on anything from php,perl to java or even c...

have a great day :)

Regards
amar

There's a nice little billing package on sourceforge called GCDB which allows users to log in and see their account status etc. You'd just need to import/integrate password stuff.

To use linux system passwords directly on your website isn't trivial. We did it with a Perl daemon which authenticates PHP apache requests and then uses system calls that are allowed to get at /etc/shadow.