authenticate users in apache against system login

[Bikerepairmann]

I'm writing a website with a secure section which users have to login.
I want to have the users (~70 to 100) be authenticated against the system login, since they are the only ones who should be able to visit the secure section. I want an unified login/passw so I/they don't have to juggle with different passwords in different places
What is the best approach to this?

Behind the login, users can check their mail, (future) upload to homepages and such things, view the IP cam, play with PLC and that sort of things.

I have looked at php login scripts but they use a mysql database to authenticate against.
I considered a groupware program but discarted it (too bulky, I would only need a few things in it, and the rest I have to do myself)

Who can help me with a solution for this?
momenteraly I run the site from a testcomputer for test purposes and I can fiddle with it for as far as I need to go.

[supaphat]

***WARNING USE SSL***

mod_auth_unix - apache 1x
mod_auth_pam - apache 2x

[Bikerepairmann]

That I should use SSL, I already understood.

I'll dive deeper into mod_auth_pam. I use Whitebox EL 4 with apache 2.
Can I maybe get some quick code? (which saves me time)

[Bikerepairmann]

I have downloaded mod_auth_pam and compiled it.
I put it in my httpd.conf and restarted apache.

followed the docs to where you make a .htaccess file (for a per directory access) and tried it on a single directory. It shows I can access the index.html without any form of authentication

What is going wrong here?
Is there someone out here who can give me a step by step walk-through?

I have a rpm based distro (whitebox 4 ) and apache (2.0.52) is compiled with LDAP (according to the system log)

in httpd.conf I put

<directory "/var/www/html/rob">
AuthPAM_Enabled on
AuthType Basic
AuthName "rob"
require valid-user
</directory>

in /etc/pam.d/httpd I put

#%PAM-1.0
auth required /lib/security/pam_smb_auth.so debug
account required /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth

I get asked for name and password (in a loop)

When I access the page in the directory I get this in my apache error log (user exists on system and password is correct.

[error] [client xx.xxx.xxx.xx] PAM: user 'xxx' - not authenticated: Authentication service cannot retrieve authentication info., referer: http://www.xxxx.xx/menu/balk_links.htm

[Bikerepairmann]

My system log says:

Oct 24 08:38:49 testbak httpd(pam_unix)[15304]: authentication failure; logname= uid=48 euid=48 tty= ruser= rhost= user=xxx

(The ID of 48 is the apache ID)

As far as I would say is that the UID (and EUID) is not correctly set.
the UID should be 500 and up to my opinion.