Authentication, userdb, Group Login

["Ton Verhagen" <ton@verhagen.net>]

Hello

We are building an application that allows subscribers
(companies) to access the pages only (no subscription = no
access). This can be done easily with the userdb, however, there
are some extra requirements which make it a bit more complicated.

Here are the requirements/restrictions:
Company1 -- has a subsription and is allowed to access the site.
All employees (employee_1 ... employee_n) of this company need to
be able to acces the site without having to login individually.

Managers (manager_1 ... manager_n) get extra priviliges (eg.
update files or order products) when they login with a username
and password.

Managers must be able to access the site from anywhere (eg. home,
office, etc).

All employees and managers accessing the site (catalog) must have
his own session.

Multiple companies can subscribe to the site of course.
Note: Some companies have a fixed IP address but not all of them.

At present we haven't been able to figure out how to address this
problem. Has anyone worked on something similar or has anyone any
idea how to implement this authentication scheme? Any pointers
are welcome.

Thanks a lot for your kind cooperation.

Best regards

Ton