we have a staging server that we would like to restrict visits to it unless the client passes Http Basic authentication challenge, if all goes well, the client should be able to navigate the site,if the user goes to a page that requires authentication (we are using forms authentication), the user should be treated as not authenticated , is that even possible?
the main reason behind this is that we don't want Google or any other Search engines to index anything on the server.
i have read many ways to implement this (basic http,robots.txt,noindex,etc...), the problem with these -if i have understood it correctly- is that they require changes to the application.
So is that possible? if not , what are your recommendations?