Topic awaiting preservation: Intergrate existing member database.

Currently i am working on a community site for a dutch camping organization. Now would they like it very much if the members could go to a members-only part of the site. So i think there a couple of options.

- Do not intergrate the exisiting database and let them all signup when they first visit the site.
This would be very simple to do but there is no control who is signing up.

-Copy the the name an member number from the existing DB to a text file and let the site check both when the signup the first time. All members do have a unique number this gives me a way to control who is logging in. Every time more than X new memebers are registerd i could add a new part to the text file.

-Create some kind of database coupling. However the website database is not on the same place as the members DB from the camping organization. Even worse the webDB is MySql and the member DB is probably acces or something like that.
If i couple both database the acces need to be reachable from the website i gues this will complicate matters since this would involve probably a VNC connection to the acces DB plus the acces DB need to run on a very redundant computer. This is probably a bit over my head.

So how did other people deal with this kind of thing?

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Webservices that do remote authentication is how I usually do this.

For example, the experimental grail calls the asylum to see if a username/password is valid.