[WEB4LIB] Which address does a VPN user show

[George Porter]

VPN, Virtual Private Networking, has been a major success at Caltech.
Unlike proxy servers, VPN handles a broad range of IP-based protocols (http,
telnet, etc).  This has enabled us, licenses permitting (this is an
important consideration), to provide lists of VPN-required servers to the
campus computing staff to offer smooth access to a broad range of resources,
including non-http client-server applications.

A brief description of the software is available on the Caltech Information
Technology Service website
<http://www.its.caltech.edu/its/services/networkra/vpn/>.

The short answer, though, is that only resources from IP ranges appearing on
the VPN server's table wind up being passed through a pseudo-proxy.  People
going to CNN, for example, do not experience any delay or additional traffic
overhead.  The observable IP address requesting VPN-enabled resources is the
on-campus IP of the VPN server.

George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 1-43, Pasadena, CA  91125
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681