Getting your off-campus users to connect to content can be tricky. There is a whole host of things that need to be setup and tested.  The setup is mostly easy, but I find the real kicker is in the testing.   URL redirects can really spoil a user's experience.

The Strategy

I've written about this before, perhaps ad nauseum but a good feature is a good feature.  Basically EZproxy has a directive called ProxyURLPassword that if set allows you to make an XML request against it and it returns back some interesting information.  In particular if you give it a URL it will return a response that says yes, this URL is recognized and any user attempting to connect to it using EZproxy will be successful.  Or no, Ezproxy won't proxy the URL if requested.  My previous post talks about more of the details but the short of it is you just need to add one line to the start of config.txt with the particular password you want to use when invoking the service.  After restarting EZproxy you'll be able to make the XML call.

Documentation and EZProxy

Before getting into it further I just wanted to take a minute to gripe.  EzProxy is awesome.  Perhaps one of the greatest library specific application created. *Ever* Albeit it is not Open Source but it still is extremely affordable.  The only complaint that I have against it is that the documentation seems to be behind and rather incomplete.  There are so, so, many features to the software but it is not always easy to find out about them.  

However it was great to see a draft copy of a comprehensive EZProxy reference manual pop up on the EZproxy support list and on the OCLC website.  So it is getting harder and harder to find something about EZproxy to complain about.

My Purpose Here

To demonstrate how useful ProxyURLPassword is (and to practice Drupal Forms API stuff) I've created a service that will try the xml call on your behalf.  You supply the proxy url, the url you'd like to test and your ProxyURLPassword.  It returns simply with Yes or No. Does the proxy like the URL or not?

Disclaimer: I'm not logging any of the values going into the form.  However if you have concerns set the password to a temporary value and then change it back after testing.  Further, please don't use it to create some sort of massive DDoS attack against some unknowing EZproxy installation.  I'll be watching log files... Call this an experiment to see if this will come back and bite me.

The Steps