Authentication w/o password?

I am potentially going to be migrating a bunch of systems from an Informix server to a Oracle server.

Currently, authentication for the unix applications (which consist primarily of perl scripts using isqlperl and DBD::Informix), is handled using BSD authentication (verification using .rhosts and /etc/hosts.equiv)

Is there a corresponding functionality in Oracle?

Basically I need to be able to say:

        If a user is from hosts A, B, or C, and claims to be USER1, and the connection is from a secure port, trust that it really is USER1 and log them into the database server as such.

Alternatives are acceptable to me:

	ident based authentication with a list of trusted hosts
	authentication using an external process

Any pointers/ideas? I've heard something about OPS$ but am not sure what it is.

BTW - I don't actually have Oracle yet, so am not really familiar with it.

• Nathan

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Nathan Neulinger                  Univ. of Missouri - Rolla
EMail: nneul_at_umr.edu                    Computer Center
WWW: http://www.umr.edu/~nneul      SysAdmin: rollanet.org