[Web4lib] Alternative EZproxy setup

[Cloutman, David]

It is important to understand that a proxy server is generally not used
to host your web pages, and the provision of that service is not
necessarily related to who will host your proxy server, unless both
processes are run on the same hardware. 

A proxy server is used to redirect network traffic and to pass it
through a specific computer (or group of computers in some cases), and
redirect it somewhere else. This has the effect of making it appear that
requests given to the proxy server are coming from the proxy server
itself, rather than the computers that are passing the requests to the
proxy server.

In our case, how this works is that when we code our database pages to
point to one of our database providers, we give the end user a URL that
directs to our proxy server. Encoded in that URL is information that
tells the proxy server where to send the traffic. Thus, on our web
pages, instead of using.

<a href="www.databaseprovider.com/login">

we use

<a href="0-www.databaseprovider.com.ourpoxyserver.lib.ca.us/login">

where ourproxyserver.lib.ca.us is the domain name of our proxy server.
Once the user clicks on the link, all the traffic that would have gone
to www.databaseprovider.com instead goes to ourproxyserver.lib.ca.us,
which then sends it to www.databaseprovider.com. At that point the
traffic no longer goes to our web server, however the database directory
pages of our web site are  still be hosted on our current web server. 

Hypothetically the proxy server in this arrangement could be physically
located anywhere. However, if your plan is to authenticate against your
catalog login for the purpose of logging in to the databases, the most
sensible arrangement is to place the proxy server in the same DMZ as
your ILL server.

---
David Cloutman <dcloutman at co.marin.ca.us>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library 

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Ruth Harrison
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 11:20 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] Alternative EZproxy setup


Hi,

My library is investigating providing remote database access to users
via EZproxy. Our web provider is another state agency. That agency is
concerned with the amount of bandwidth this will require. They are
willing to proceed, if we are able to purchase more bandwidth. We cannot
afford their price and want to look elsewhere. The problem is we cannot
move our webpage. Is there an alternative EZproxy setup that will not
affect the bandwidth of our current web site? For example, could we find
another web provider for the database pages only? Has anyone else faced
a similar situation? How did you resolve it? I have never used EZproxy.
While reading through the information about it, this seems possible to
me, but I don't know very much about networking, so this may be totally
wrong. Any suggestions that anyone may have are appreciated.

Thank you.



Ruth Harrison



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