Library Web Chic

I noticed that there was a question about authenticating users from off campus via on the Web4Lib mailing list today and it got me thinking that we have EZProxy set up a little different from some other SUNYs and I didn’t know if others had tried setting things up this way. So I wanted to talk a little bit about our EZProxy setup. We run EZProxy on the same Windows machine as our web server. It runs as a service and has its own website (http://libproxy.cortland.edu) in IIS. This saves the cost of multiple servers and maintainence of multiple machines. Having EZProxy run as its own website is nice because it means that we can change hardware relatively easily without worrying about having to change all of our proxied urls. The networking staff just changes a setting and that’s that. I like this set up because I can keep an eye on EZProxy and start and stop it (via batch files) when I need to because I have access to the server it lives on. Before it lived on a box that the library staff didn’t have access to and we had to request that EZProxy be stopped. Our campus networking staff did a great job getting this working and we are very happy with the current set up. We haven’t had any issues with the server being overloaded either. So if you have an existing box that can take an additional load this is one way to go.