Access

[Albert Lunde]

Northwestern University is using proxy web and telnet gateways with
password authentication to provide access to site-licensed database
services.

There's a description of this for end users at:

http://www.library.nwu.edu/help/proxy/

I think the web gateway is a Netscape proxy server, with an added module to
do password authentication from our campus-wide "netid" (Kerberos and other
stuff) authentication database.

We tell people who use Netscape to use autoconfiguration, which references
a big Javascript script that specifies what should go thru the proxy; we
tell other's to turn it off when not needed.

The telnet gateway is just a menu one telnets to which in turn telnets to
selected other sites. I think this was hacked together from the BSD
telnet/telnetd sources, but I suppose it could be done a number of other
ways.

I didn't have anything to do with the legal end, but I'll note that we've
been cutting back on outside accounts and our authentication database now
tracks who is really NU-affiliated.

One down-side of this approach is that the authtication to the proxy is a
clear text password. (This is hard to get around using a standard proxy
server.)

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    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu