Authenication

[adman4054]

I use Zoom 5.0 Professional for a newspaper client of mine. They recently decided to allow access to "subscribers only". I used the authentication setting in Zoom and that works fine for the subscribers with user names and passwords (although for the life of me I cant figure out how zoom has the subscriber info, its located on a different server in the form of a mysql db).

I have the htaccess file set up to allow their ip range so that they dont have to enter user/pass info. Is there some way I can add the range of ips to the Zoom file(s).

Thanks

[Ray]

I used the authentication setting in Zoom and that works fine for the subscribers with user names and passwords (although for the life of me I cant figure out how zoom has the subscriber info, its located on a different server in the form of a mysql db).

If you are using the cookie authentication method as described here, then this is purely dependent on the cookies shared with Internet Explorer, relying on you to have logged in via IE and that your cookie is effective for the duration of the indexing session. See the link above for more information.

I have the htaccess file set up to allow their ip range so that they dont have to enter user/pass info. Is there some way I can add the range of ips to the Zoom file(s).

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean you want to specify what IPs Zoom will use when it is running in Spider mode? Zoom has no control of this, your IP is dependent on your computer, your internet connection and your ISP.

You can however, specify a User-Agent string in V5.1 (Enterprise Edition only). This allows you to identify the spider in your scripts and give access accordingly. More information here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/useragent.html

Just in case you haven't considered this - if your newspaper site do not contain dynamically generated pages (ie. PHP, ASP, CFM, etc.), and instead, only contains static pages (HTML, PDF, DOC, etc) then you may be able to index all the content offline, and not need to worry about authenticating the spider.

[adman4054]

"I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean you want to specify what IPs Zoom will use when it is running in Spider mode? Zoom has no control of this, your IP is dependent on your computer, your internet connection and your ISP."

With an Apache web server, utilizing .htaccess, you can "allow" certain ip addresses instead of user/pass auth. I'm wondering if there is a place within a Zoom file that I could "allow" the same ip addresses.

[Ray]

With an Apache web server, utilizing .htaccess, you can "allow" certain ip addresses instead of user/pass auth. I'm wondering if there is a place within a Zoom file that I could "allow" the same ip addresses.

Sorry, but you're not clarifying what you are expecting Zoom to do when it "allows" these IP addresses. Are you talking about the search script or the Indexer? The Authentication settings you mentioned in the original post only applies to the Indexer in Spider Mode. But this makes little sense in the context of what you are asking for. Are you talking about the search script instead, and perhaps you're expecting the search script to block access, so that only certain IP addresses can access the search page?

If this is what you mean, the short answer is: Zoom does not provide security/access features, and it is not intended to. Any security/access restriction can be implemented outside of the search script - you can simply use the same .htaccess file to restrict access to the "search.php" file.

If you require a more elaborate access control/restriction (eg. all users can access the search page, some users can search in certain categories, others cannot), then you'll need to provide more details and have a better idea of what exactly you require before we can give you more meaningful advice. There are also various threads in the forum which has discussed the example I mentioned such as these:
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1281
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1509