master.passwd auth for apache22

[John Morgan Salomon]

Hi there,

I've been banging my head against trying to get http auth (you know,  
the little username/password popup window) working for Apache 2.2 on  
FreeBSD 6.1 for a while now.  It's working beautifully via SASL for  
Postfix and Dovecot, but I am looking for a reasonably non-kludgey  
way for the webserver to do it, short of adding a bunch of users to  
group shadow.

Unfortunately, mod_auth_pwcheck only seems to work nicely for Apache  
1.3.

Has anyone done this sort of thing?  I'd prefer to not use .htaccess  
or any non-master.passwd auth mechanism.

Thanks,

-John