username computername from CGI

Question

is there a way to get the remote client's username and computername through CGI in perl? I tried printing ENV hash in the CGI script but i couldnt get this information

Answer 1

No. That information is not passed over HTTP, and may not exist at all (e.g. my phone doesn't require me to log in with a username, it is a single user device).

You can get the IP address of the machine the request came from (which might be a proxy server), and use that to get the DNS (or other network protocol) name, but that is about as close as you can get.

Answer 2

Check out the remote_host and remote_addr methods. They are likely to get you as close as you will be able to get to a "computer name". Username is not likely passed at all via http headers (e.g. technically you may consider the authorization and/or email header to be close, however its unlikely either would be populated in most situations).

The remote_host method in particular performs a reverse DNS lookup. Should something be returned you will get the result, else you will simply get the remote address (e.g. ip).