[WEB4LIB] Re: multiple IP addresses and electronic journals

[cruby]

I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions.  At least 8 people
suggested EZProxy and a couple of others offered information on how their
organizations handled the problem.  This is all very helpful.  I am going to
pass this information on to our information systems group to see what they
can come up with.  With over 10,000 workstations around the world that could
potentially try to get to our electronic serials, EZProxy may be the best
solution.  

We are the only physical library for the corporation and have had to learn
all sorts of new things in the last 2 or 3 years as we moved from being an
Idaho company to an international one.  This list has been of immeasurable
help as we try to expand our services virtually.

Carolyn

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Murray [mailto:PMurray at law.uconn.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 8:39 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: multiple IP addresses and electronic journals


--On Tuesday, April 17, 2001 9:33 AM -0700 cruby <cruby at micron.com> 
wrote:

> Before I have to track down all the new IP address ranges and then
> start working with the publishers to add the addresses to our account
> or switch to passwords,  I'd like to see if there is any way to set
> things up so that, say someone in Italy, can go to our library web
> site based in Boise and gain access to the journal contents with the
> Boise IP address rather than the Italy address.

Bill and Robin have suggested EZproxy as a solution to your problem, 
and EZproxy is a good solution to the general problem of remote access 
to research databases.  However, I think you have a more specific 
problem.  To restate your problem, you want to find a way to funnel 
specific IP addresses from other libraries through an IP address at 
your Boise library which all of the database vendors accept as valid.

Probably the easiest thing to do to solve this specific problem is to 
set up a generic proxy server in Boise and restrict access at that 
proxy server to the specific IP address ranges of your remote 
libraries.  Just about any proxy server can be set up with those sort 
of restrictions (Apache, Squid, MS Proxy, etc...).

You'll probably want to set up a proxy autoconfig file for all of those 
remote workstations so that they know about your proxy server in Boise, 
and you can set things up such that your Boise proxy server interceeds 
in connections that are going to database vendors.


Peter
--
Peter Murray, Computer Services Librarian              W: 860-570-5233
University of Connecticut Law School             Hartford, Connecticut