[rt-devel] Authenticating users vs. using an external database

[Landon Stewart]

Our RT implementation will likely be running on a separate machine than our 
customer control panel.  Our customer database is on another machine 
altogether (on an internal non-routable network behind a NAT/firewall thats 
in a completely different country)  Customers can do a myriad of things on 
the control panel like see their invoices, bandwidth usage, order new 
services and apply payment (among other things).

I'd like to tie our control panel system into RT.

Our customer database contains all the information about each customer that 
you would ever want to know, what services they have, the domain names for 
each of those services, if they have a colocated or leased server, the IP's 
that server has etc etc. as well as the email addresses used by this 
customer for administrative purposes (where their invoices are sent and how 
we would communicate with them via email).

I would like to use this database to authenticate users, ultimately it 
would be nice to have RT use this database instead of the table built into 
RT's database.
   OR
I am pretty proficient with perl, I could have it automagically create 
(with RT::User) the account in RT's system if they don't already have one 
just before they log in to RT (ie. it'd check to see if they have an 
account already and if they don't, use the info and create one right before 
they login).

Has anyone done this already?  What's the best way to go about it in your 
opinion?  I wouldn't mind reinventing the wheel a little bit, but I don't 
want to if I don't have to.