As previously accounced, PALNI is now able to provide proxy service for any library that wants it. We have installed EZProxy and are able to run an instance of it for each PALNI library. Just to review, the main purpose of a proxy server is to provide a way for your off-campus users to access your licensed electronic resources. It does this by basically replacing the user's home IP address with the address of the proxy server, which is registered with the vendors to which you want to provide access. From the vendor's perspective, it looks at if the user is coming from a registered IP, rather than from their actual home IP. For those vendor's who authenticate by username/password, EZProxy can also log the user in without the user ever seeing the actual username/password.

In practice, the way this works is you preface the URL for the vendor with the proxy address, e.g. http://ezproxy.palni.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com. When EZProxy receives the request it checks the user's IP address. If the IP address is in EZProxy's configuration files, i.e. the user is on-campus, then EZProxy just sends them on to the vendor and stays out of the picture. If the user is off-campus, then EZProxy asks them to enter a username and password. In our case, EZProxy is currently setup to query the Aleph patron database, so the user would enter their library ID and pin. If the username and password are valid, EZProxy sets a cookie and routes the user to the target URL. All traffic between the user and the vendor is then routed through EZProxy for the duration of the session. It is also possible to configure EZProxy to authenticate the user against LDAP or any of a number of alternate authentication sources.