[WEB4LIB] Re: IP Authentication for Databases-Prob

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

>The difficulty we have is if clients of ours want to access IP-restricted
>providers, we have no way at present of giving them an IP that would be
>recognized as ours.
>
>We cannot change the clients' proxy server settings (as most ISP's have a
>proxy or two that they pass their clients through- eg Squid).

This issue has been pretty much beaten to death here.  What you want
is either a URL rewriter or a reverse proxy.  I don't think you want
to get into a situation of having to maintain a bunch of passwords
(how do you distribute them? how do you periodically change them - or
do you just have permanent ones that people can use forever? how do
you keep them all straight? what do you do with the vendors who don't
want to give you one?).

Our reverse proxy is documented at:

  http://www.stg.brown.edu/pub/proxydoc/Proxy.tr98.1.shtml

Richard Goerwitz
Brown University