Proxy server help

[Richard L. Goerwitz]

This is a response to Jim Green/LeBay's question regarding off-campus
access to licensed databases.  The long and short of it is:  Take a look
at:

    http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/proxydoc/report.shtml

Jim states the essence of the "proxy problem" very well.  Basically, we
would all be using regular proxies (like Squid), except that:

  1) they require every user to reconfigure their browser (in ways that
     may not even be allowed by their ISPs)

There is also the problem that

  2) regular proxies (like Squid) don't do secure authentication

It is possible to configure Apache to run in pass-through mode, which
solves some of these problems.  The problem here, though, is that, as
Jim notes:

  3) we have no control over the documents generated by the database
     vendor

Jim's conclusion is that he'll have to rewrite Apache's proxy module.

The answer here, we've found, is that it is in fact possible to rewrite
the Apache proxy module to do very fast, fairly reliable filtering.  See:


-- 

Richard Goerwitz
PGP key fingerprint:    C1 3E F4 23 7C 33 51 8D  3B 88 53 57 56 0D 38 A0
For more info (mail, phone, fax no.):  finger richard at goon.stg.brown.edu