adding packages on shared hosting / Auth

Hello, PEAR newbie here, with some simple questions. My shared host has PEAR, but I have no access to the "pear" PHP utility. For my first project I needed a beta module so I just created a private directory "pear_extras", added the path to my includes path (before the path to my host's pear install) and placed the module files there. This worked like a charm, but will it in general? Any other caveats? I gather that, if a module requires more recent versions of dependencies then I'll have to also place these in my pear_extras directory... Also, re: Auth, how does this module keep the session: PHP sessions? plain old cookies? Steve -- http://mrclay.org/ * http://frenchhorns.mrclay.org/