SOCKS

[Dawn Kovacs]

Hello - I hope some of you out there can help me.

I'd like to know what SOCKS is and how it can be used.
I've looked at their web site  (http://www.socks.nec.com/)  
but I'm still not sure I understand what it is.

Here's what we'd like to do:
We have 15 public workstations that access CD-ROM and online 
products.  We currently get our online products via telnet but we 
want to start accessing them on the Web.  We want to be sure our 
patrons use the Web for these products only and don't go anywhere 
else. (We have other public Internet workstations where people sign 
up for an hour or 2 and go wherever they want.)

We plan to use Netscape's kiosk version but we can't lock the
CTRL-L to open a location.   From what I've been able to understand
about SOCKS  so far, is that we could set up a SOCKS proxy server
and allow patrons access to only our Reference sites (Searchbank, 
FirstSearch, SIRS, etc.)   We'd then use the SOCKS client on these 15 
public workstations to be sure patrons are using them as they were 
intended.

Am I way off base here?  Is this what SOCKS' purpose is?  Does anyone 
use it?  Is it easy to set up?   Can anyone help???

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Dawn Kovacs
Head of Technical Services
Wheaton Public Library
Wheaton, Illinois
d-kovacs at mail.wheaton.lib.il.us