I'm assuming you've installed, and are running PWS (Personal Web Server) on your machine, if you are not already working on a server that supports ASP.

First of all, create a database, for instance, customers.Define a table with all fields you require (include email and password).

After database has been created, you need to create a DNS in order to access this database through your ASP pages.

If you have never created it, this is how you do it:

Go to Control Panel (My Computer -> Control Panel), and click on icon that should be saying "ODBC Data Sources (32bit)". In resulting window, select "System DSN" tab. Then click on "Add..." button. From given list of Database drivers, select "Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)" and click "Finish" button. You reach a place where you have to enter "Data Source Name". Enter it, anything, for instance, "customers". Then click "Select..." button. This lets you select Access database you created. Press Ok, press Ok, and press Ok. Your DSN is created.

In first part, I'll write about storing passwords.

Before this, let's make an include file to create and initialize session variables that we are going to need (we can use cookies, but some clever folks disable cookies on their browsers).

File name: sessions.inc

<%

if session("email")="" then session("email")="notlogged" session("pass")="" end if

%>

This file you can include in every page as

so that you can use them whenever you need them.

Now accepting login and password.

For this you require a normal HTML form. You can have "n" number of fields in a form, but here, our primary concern is, getting email as login, and accompanying password.

Here's form:

Please enter your details:

We validate form before it proceeds to "action" file so that there is very little server-side processing. A simple validation:

Note: Put following Javascript above tag.

We soon learned error of our ways - TCP/IP is far more complex than we had originally believed. However, after some head scratching and a few phone calls, we managed to get our network up and running.

We didn't know any better, so we simply hard coded TCP/IP address into each workstation and server. In fact, we hard coded everything, including DNS and WINS server addresses, subnet and gateway address.

For our purposes, this worked great for several years. We added machines slowly and planned everything far in advance, so it was no big deal to just add a new machine to network. A few simple edits to network control panel was all that was needed, and since our network was very static, we didn't have to visit those setting very often at all.

As our company grew this scheme started to get more and more awkward. Originally we had a nice, isolated, self-contained network, but now we needed to get on internet, we were adding not only new workstations and servers at a furious rate, but we had to deal with PDAs, handheld systems, standalone file servers and hundreds of other computers.

To make matters even worse, where our network was very static, now it was becoming dynamic. Computers would be added and removed constantly - someone would plug his handheld into an ethernet jack, get their email, unplug and be gone.

The static TCP/IP scheme that we had been using (a spreadsheet with a list of machines and related addresses) was simply no longer working. Fortunately, there was an answer - DHCP.