EDIT: I will contact the university about my problem after labor day weekend, but I thought if someone knew a quick fix that I haven't tried, or if the problem has an obvious fix then I could hope to try my luck here, thanks!
TLDR: Sorry its a long post, I thought I should be... thorough. I am having a common issue (found a dead thread through google with no solution to the same problem) with the prompt to enter in a username and password via htaccess rights, but this prompt will keep popping up asking for a username and password when trying to access my home directory on my university's server which has the .htaccess and .htpasswd files. It does not matter if I enter in correct or incorrect credentials, the prompt will keep asking me for input without displaying my home directory.
Ever since I have included these ht files I have never once been able to get past the username/password no matter what I have tried, save for removing them from the directory I am trying to access (my top level directory that I own).
This kind of served my original goal of making the top level directory inaccessible to casual users, but if I wanted to use this method on other places, I would want it to work as intended. And I also like it when computers do what I wish they would, so any help is appreciated.
Some things I have tried:
Changing the file/directory access rights:
they told me to try these commands if people can't access my files
cd ~/public_html
find ./ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find ./ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
enter in the single character name/pw at least twenty times in a row, no cheddar.
so I changed directory with cd ~ in hopes that this would be my home directory, since my home directory contains the "public_html" directory, so logic tells me that the ~ tilde symbol is the top level directory that I have ownership of. Then I did those two commands to change the rights on the files inside, I am still having no luck.
How I got to this point:
I have been following the instructions given to me through my university's website for setting up my little directory. A link on how they describe how to password protect the home directory is given below:
"Protect Web Directories" instructions
I have everything in order except for one small detail that I feel probably does not matter. I am on windows and so I am using winSCP to remote control my allocated server space. The small detail is that as the instructions indicate (on step 3) that I should use the command htpasswd -c .htpasswd {username} where {username} is my folder that holds my allocated server space. But this command requires further input through the terminal, and unfortunately winSCP does not offer this kind of functionality. So I looked up some basic instructions on using htaccess and it is formatted correctly such that the .htaccess file appears as follows:
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Verify"
AuthUserFile /correctpath/.htpasswd
require valid-user
and this file is in the root directory for my server space as well as the .htpasswd file which has only this data inside: username:password
I know for sure that these two files must be formatted correctly, at least according to their tutorial, because before my path was incorrectly formatted via including some curly { braces } without knowing the correct way to do this at first. And the password prompt that shows up when accessing my directory responded by loading an error page indicating to contact OSU admin or something not important. But now that I have everything like it 'should' be. I know this because when I enter in my credentials "username and password" the prompt pops up for my username and password again and again whether or not I enter in correct information. The only exception is that if I click cancel it will direct me to a page saying that I need to enter in a username and password.
Note that I am very inexperienced at server-related buisness, two days ago I couldn't have told you what a website actually consists of. So, if you use some technical jargon I may or may not need to look it up and get back to you before I actually understand what you mean, but I am a quick learner and it probably wont matter.
