Hi Andrew,
I’m trying to do a similar thing. A public library that wants to subscribe to our videos which are on a WordPress site, using EZproxy, so their patrons can also access at home. Did you find any solutions?
Suzanne
Hi Suzanne
FYI, we actually decided to implement our site in Drupal, and used LDAP to hold user details to be access by a number of systems, including ezproxy and drupal.
However, I think your requirement is different to ours. We wanted our users to access web resources from home, and we used ezproxy to achieve this.
From your email, you are a resource that someone wants to access.
EzProxy is a middleware technology that rewrites web addresses, and gives the appearance that users are connected to a resource from inside a particular ip address range.
So I don’t believe you require ezproxy.
Do you restrict access to users via an ip-range now, or is access to your site controlled by user id and password?
Kind Regards
-Andrew
Hi Andrew
Thank you for the insight
Our site is sort of like a green Netflix, We have streaming docs and want to offer subscriptions to public libraries.
A public library is working with us…they use EZproxy and want to make our website accessible to their patrons at home or work or mobile. The patrons enter their barcode and PW as you know…. then would be directed to our homepage.
The library can give us a range of 10 IP addresses. I was skyping with a programmer who said he could write the necessary code using those IP addresses and user name and pW, to allow their EZproxy software to ‘handshake’ with our site.
Since most libraries use EZproxy or similar…we want to use this as a model.
anyway, that’s what we are trying to achieve!
Suzanne
Hi Suzanne
Just to share my understanding of how library services and ezproxy work.
I presume your website uses a user id and password to confirm access to your videos?
Libraries want to provide access to lots of services (hosted on lots of different websites) to their users. Ideally they don’t want the hassel of having to share lots of different ids and passwords for these sites with their users. They’d like users to login in to the library service and then automatically get access to any 3rd party service they are subscribing to.
As library computers will be on a specific range of ip addresses, they communicate this ip range to their suppliers. On the supplier websites, code checks the ip address and says “OK, you’re in the ip range of So and So library, Welcome”. Typically no id and password is used.
Of course when a library user accesses the service from home (i.e. not on a library computer) their ip address will be different – it will be the one given to them by their ISP.
This is where ezproxy comes in. The library runs ezproxy, and as long as the user at home has logged into the library, ezproxy will make it appear that the request to access a 3rd party service comes from an ip address of the library (i.e. it makes it appear as if the user is using a library computer).
Thus on your server, you just need to ensure access is given to the ip range passed onto you by the library.
I hope the above is useful.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what’s involved to provide access to a wordpress site by ip address range.
Alternatively, could you tell the library that they need to use an id and password to access your site, and you give them a id and password that they share with their users.
All the best
-Andrew
