.htaccess or OS related?

[Jos Chrispijn]

I ran into a problem last night that I was able to solve, but generated a
question:

I have this hosting provider (uses Debian OS) on which I can't use htpasswd
to generate user and password to protect a single file. 

To have this done I solved it as follows: did a htpasswd on my own server
(FreeBSD 7) and simply copied the file with the user:password (scrambled) to
my home directory I have with this hosting provider and referred in the
.htaccess to it. And now comes the fun stuff: it worked without probs.


So the algorithm that is used on FreeBSD to scramble a user password is the
same as it is used by Debian? Isn't that a security gap?

Jos