Proxy server for off-site access to Web licensed products

[Chris Zagar]

We're facing a problem that can't be terribly unique, so I'm curious to
know if anyone else has cracked it.

We've started licensing products on the Web from companies such as
Britannica, Gale and IAC.  These companies are using IP address as the
means of validation, which limits off-site access to people with PPP
access through our dialups.  We don't have the resources to extend this
type of access to our students, so they are deprived of access.

I know that IAC has a solution in beta to address access to their
databases, but the other vendors that I've spoken with haven't been
particularly interested in helping to solve this problem.

An uncontrolled solution to the problem would be to implement a standard
WWW proxy server and have students point to it and access, but this has
the downsides of bouncing all of their traffic through our site and lacks
any form of authentication for complying with licensing agreements. 

It seems to us that a better solution would be to implement an
intermediate server using techniques as employed by "The Anonymizer"
(http://www.anonymizer.com).  In this scenario, the user would use a
special form of URL such as http://fixer.maricopa.edu?http://www.eb.com,
which would cause the browser to contact fixer.maricopa.edu, fixer would
then contact www.eb.com, pull down the page, modify all of the URLs in the
page by preceding them with http://fixer.maricopa.edu? (actually, not
quite that easy thanks to relative URLs, but you get the idea), then
sending this modified page back to the client.

Before we embark on anything, we'd love to find out ways that others have
used to crack this some problem.  Any information would be gratefully
appreciated.

Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Zagar                                   Glendale Community College
Instructional Technologist                        6000 West Olive Avenue
zagar at gcinfo.gc.maricopa.edu                         Glendale, AZ  85302
http://gcinfo.gc.maricopa.edu/~zagar/                     (602) 435-3515