ASP.NET Modules

Mono provides support for gzip encoding and basic and digest authentication in xsp as modules. These can be used with mod_mono too, but as apache already has modules to do that, they are less useful.

The modules are in the Mono.Http.dll assembly distributed with mono.

Enabling gzip compression in xsp

Add the following inside <configuration>…</configuration> in your web.config:

<!-- This enables parsing the mono.aspnet section that follows -->
<configSections>
  <sectionGroup name="mono.aspnet">
     <section name="acceptEncoding"
              type="Mono.Http.Configuration.AcceptEncodingSectionHandler, Mono.Http, Version=1.0.5000.0, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756"/>
  </sectionGroup>
</configSections>
<httpModules>
  <add name="AcceptEncodingModule"
       type="Mono.Http.Modules.AcceptEncodingModule, Mono.Http, Version=1.0.5000.0, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756"/>
</httpModules>
 
<mono.aspnet>
  <acceptEncoding>
  <!-- Change disabled to 'no' to enable gzip content encoding
       By default it is disabled. -->
    <add encoding="gzip"
         type="Mono.Http.GZipWriteFilter, Mono.Http, Version=1.0.5000.0, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756"
         disabled="no" />
  </acceptEncoding>
</mono.aspnet>

And that’s it. It will load Mono.Http.dll from the GAC and send compressed responses when the client supports it.

Basic and Digest authenticaton

Mono also provides support for Basic and Digest authentication.

Both modules get their user list from a XML file that looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<users>
<user name="gonzalo" password="password">
    <role name="user" />
</user>
</users>

They both need to get the file name containing the users and the realm from the configuration. This is configurable using <appSettings> in your web.config file. The following example is valid for basic authentication. Replace “Basic” with “Digest” and you’ll get the equivalent digest configuration:

<appSettings>
  <add key="Basic.Users" value="/srv/userdata/users.xml" />
  <add key="Basic.Realm" value="My Realm" />
</appSettings>

Now we need to enable the corresponding module. This is done by adding the following line inside <httpModules>…</httpModules> in your web.config file:

<add name="BasicAuthenticationModule" 
     type="Mono.Http.Modules.BasicAuthenticationModule, Mono.Http, Version=1.0.5000.0, PublicKeyToken=0738eb9f132ed756"/>

Again, replace “Basic” with “Digest” and you’ll get the configuration for digest authentication.