Software company needs an IP address - what do I give them?!

[sidewinder]

Why is it software providers, especially those dealing with a school, dont actually consider that we are rarely in a normal situation with regards to internet access?

 

A member of staff came to see my today about a 'History Today' subscription they have ordered, and they need an IP address or range so they can give that specific range subscriber access

 

Problem is, what the hell do I give them? Internally we use a 172.16.0.0/16 range, the LEA use a 172.20.0.0/16 range, so our 'external' IP is really just a private address still

The only address that I can see is seen publicly is the LEA Proxy address, but giving them that would give access to every school in the county, which would breach our licence

 

We have no remote access setup whatsoever, so its not even as if I have an external address for this school at all

 

I will contact the LEA but what have other people done in this situation? I know we arnt the only ones with this type of setup.

[_Bat_]

I personally wouldn't bother with the LEA - it's not their fault. Contact the tech support of the software company and have a rant at them. If every school with this setup does this, they may get a clue that it was a ridiculous idea in the first place.

[Butuz]

Sensible people would use a username and password to protect website content. Rant at the company for being silly? I mean using IP addresses is as silly as Monty Python!

 

Andrew

[greenfieldsupport]

most schools end up going through a forced proxy, to allow filtering and logging etc. this means basically that your school most likely shares an external IP address with other schools,

 

I imagine they wouldnt want to give all schools in your area access because your paying, so tell them you require a username / password soultion like butuz says.

[webman]

Or tell them that if IP "security" is all you can offer then you want a discounted price eg. a fraction of how ever many schools there are in the LEA who share that one IP address

[sidewinder]

Thanks guys, I talked to their tech guy on the phone and the only other solution he could offer was of course - usernames and passwords

I'm not a ranting kind of person though so I couldn't really tell him what I thought of the IP solution

 

Hopefully they won't order it now, so they'll lose out on a sale and find a better way round it

[sidewinder]

Well they obviously wanted a sale quite badly, as they decided to allow the subscription for the proxy address I gave them, even though I warned them it would be available to all schools. "Oh they won't know about it so its OK" they said

 

I'm tempted to contact all the other schools and let them know about 'their' free subscription

[plock]

sidewinder: I personally would!

[sparkeh]

sidewinder: I personally would!

 

I wouldn't as aren't there potential legal issues here?

 

I know its the down to the system the company uses but I wouldn't want to be responsible for informing others how to get at content without paying for it.

 

Did you speak to your RBC about this? They also might not be too happy that their schools have access to unlicensed content.

[plock]

I wouldn't as aren't there potential legal issues here?

 

I know its the down to the system the company uses but I wouldn't want to be responsible for informing others how to get at content without paying for it.

 

Did you speak to your RBC about this? They also might not be too happy that their schools have access to unlicensed content.

 

Yes very true!

[srochford]

We *like* software that's restricted by IP - we can just give the external addresses of our ISA servers and then users are up and running - no usernames or passwords etc, it just works.

 

Of course, I recognise that this doesn't work for many other organisations that have a sort of "two-tier" proxy but then username and password can also cause problems - if we use the same details for all users then what's to stop them just giving those details out to all and sundry?

 

There are other ways of protecting internet based resources - we use Athens for some (http://www.athens.ac.uk/) but Athens will cost money from next year so we will probably move on. Shibboleth is likely to replace it (http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/) but we haven't made much progress on setting it up yet :-(

 

Did anyone else use Richard Naylor's (Methodist College, Belfast) Network Login System on the RML 480z? If so, do you remember that "shibboleth" was the default password :-)

[sparkeh]

Did anyone else use Richard Naylor's (Methodist College, Belfast) Network Login System on the RML 480z? If so, do you remember that "shibboleth" was the default password :-)

 

Ha ha - almost fell off my chair at that one :laughing5:

[_Bat_]

Okay, well in regards to IP addresses and usernames and passwords, we use educationcity.com which got around the restirctions of each of these methods. Each school that registers to use their website gets a very long unique web address e-mailed to them (something like http://www.educationcity.com/login.php?id=hghndlkhtf554hdkdnr etc etc) and then the school can place a shortcut to that web address on the network. This automatically logs in anyone who clicks on that web address.

 

They are also e-mailed a username and password, but that is just in case really.

 

So they don't use any of this "give us your IP" rubbish and don't have the restrictions of usernames and passwords, such as having to give out the username and password to everyone.

 

Good idea I thought.

[ajbritton]

Hmmm. A good idea until the staff figure out that they can email the shortcut to anyone and it will work!

[Geoff]

We have some Careers/Post Sixteen Stuff that works the same way.

[john]

Electronic Britanica Online wokrs via IP or logon, I love the IP one means that there aint any details to forget.

[Guest Guest]

Surerly the ip solutions stop kids from doing any work in their spare time

[john]

In a way yes and another no, means they cannot post it on a blogg site and get us into trouble and I think its for internal use only.