I often want to restrict web access to a set of pages to a select group of people, but really do not want to deal with the hassle of assinging peopel passwords, coping with lost or changed or forgotten passwords, etc. This document describes how I set things up so that I can designate a selected group of people who will have access via their Unix login names and passwords.

The basis of this approach lies in the htaccess files supported by the Apache web servers. It's a good idea to get some basic familiarity with how this works before you read further.