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Offering restricted content using webproxy

Thu, 2005-03-24 18:41 — villiam

Has anyone tried to offer restricted content with the web proxy channel? I have a set of PDF's that are sitting in a directory on our public webserver with an .htaccess file setup to restict access to that directory unless you are on a campus computer.

We want to allow employees logged into Luminis to be able to access these PDFs when they are at home. This is why I think the web proxy channel might be a good solution as it will connect to that web server with a campus IP address.

However when I set the channel up links to the PDFs cause Luminis to generate an error within that channel. I had set the pass through mode as all, and then tried adding ?cw_passThrough=none to the URL for each PDF file.

In reading the documentation of the web proxy channel here I came across the blurb


In some cases, you don't want a link to go through the normal mechanisms,
but instead wish it to be handled as a download for an object with its
own MIME type. CWebProxy includes a way to indicate this.

However I am unable to find any examples on their site that does this (this I think is what I want). Have any of you tried something like this?

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Wed, 2007-03-28 09:15 — bdefnall

from the dead it rises.... i need the exact same thing to work

bdefnall at westga dot edu

but i can't get it to work and i'm banging my head against the wall. my scenario is that i have a set of .Net apps that output pdfs for a department. those .Net apps are restricted to a certain *subnet* here on campus. said department needs those restrictions to remain as they are, but be able to access the pdfs via the portal. I have a custom jsp app that can reach out and interact with those .Net apps and retrieve the pdfs and return them to the portal. next step is to make the portal allow the user to download that file instead of trying to render it. I have a solution (a little dirty but it works), but it will require me to open up a port to the world that i'd rather not open.

so has anyone been able to make luminis allow a file download off a web proxy channel?

Tue, 2008-04-08 13:16 — wjdennen

Rising from the ashes

Has anyone gotten this to work? Thanks.

Fri, 2008-04-11 12:12 — villiam

Alas no

I never did find a way with the web proxy channel to do this. As the request that I received initiated my interest in this was not critical I we dropped the idea.

Shortly after that time I came up with an idea (that I have yet to implement) that would have me create a custom java "proxy" channel to do just that.

The other thing I sorta figured out was the documentation I referenced was for a newer version of web proxy, so perhaps Luminis IV will be nicer regarding this.

Fri, 2008-04-11 17:35 — wjdennen

we found something that works

We found that adding this to the link allows us to download pdfs!

?cw_download=true

ie:

<a href="http://webserver.edu/file/file.pdf?cw_download=true">download pdf</a>

Wed, 2008-04-16 14:09 — Jason

proxy

We run our own proxy server which hooks into the luminis ldap. It recognizes based on referrer, and the user's sessions, whether they are coming from the portal, and then allows access to areas of our intranet that we've told the proxy to allow access to.

I've never tried the proxy channel, but regular free open source proxy servers appear to work well, at least for our needs. I can get the details if your interested in trying something outside of the luminis channel framework.

Thu, 2008-04-17 04:10 — rich

alternative security

we've gone a different way with this - create a JSP that matches a path http://portal.ac.uk/cp/mysite/site/*
(setup web.xml)

So the user can access documents:
e.g. http://portal.ac.uk/cp/mysite/site/phonedir/telephonedirectory.html

The JSP needs to do authentication - which we've used CAS for - the advantage of this is that user's send
be outside the portal when they access the URL and they will automatically be asked to authenticate
before they are allowed to retrieve the document.

disadvantages are - our CAS runs on a weird prt - can cause trouble with off-campus firewalls.

rich