Secure Area Problems

[tombarnett]

Hey, apologies if this is in the wrong forum or doesn't make any sense, I'm not big on PHP and yeah.  Anyway, I've been given the task of creating a secure area for copyrighted material at a school; they need the kids (1,200 of them) to be able to access very expensive resources that just sticking in a web folder may revoke licenses for.  A number of these files are images so a simple content management system wasn't going to do it, and with time constraints something more complex was ruled out.  To complicate matters, the site is run on an IIS Windows 2003 Server which I have no experience with whatsoever, and to further complicate things the users are already stored in a mysql database, so I can't just start something from scratch.

 

I came up with a solution however, one which works a dream in Firefox but unfortunately not in Internet Explorer (surprise surprise) which authenticates the user then in the code redirects them (using header) to http://user:password@website.com/folder/ (a single username has been set up for this folder using IISPassword) - in firefox this logs them in (albeit with a message) whilst in IE the browser rejects this URL syntax.  I was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions for a way round this problem?  Theres probably something blindingly obvious but as I say I'm somewhat of a PHP novice.

 

Thanks in advance for any help that you may be able to give.