OK, so I have this project in my class at B.U. that’s requiring that we do research on IEEE articles via the IEEE Xplore website. The big PITA there is that I can’t access that website outside of B.U.. Access is granted via IP based authentication, which means you need to be accessing that site via a system on B.U.’s address block in order to use it.
In case someone out there’s ever interested in knowing how you can defeat this inconvenience, here are the steps I took in order to access the Xplore website from home, work, etc., by passing my data through SSH port forwarding. It’s basic ssh stuff, but still handy to mention here (and as far as I know this is not illegal! You need a B.U. login in order to do this, so that’s legitimate enough).
- Make sure you have an account on some B.U. system that you can ssh into. Here I use metcs.bu.edu as an example.
- Make sure your system isn’t running a web server on port 80. If so, kill it.
- Become superuser on your system — you have to do this in order to forward a priveleged port (80)
- # ssh -N -L 80:ieeexplore.ieee.org:80 username@metcs.bu.edu
- Open another shell. As root, edit /etc/hosts and make ieeexplore.ieee.org an alias for 127.0.0.1
- Open your web browser to http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/DynWel.jsp.
- Voila! You can now use the IEEE Xplore facilities as if you were sitting at a B.U. terminal.
If you need to do this on a Windows system, install Cygwin.
UPDATE: B.U. has an off-campus proxy server that the professor refused to tell us about, or maybe he just didn’t know. So about the above….nevermind.
I’m sure its not illegal. I do it all the time with WPI, but they’re nice enough to tell you how to do it…
Comment by Bob — January 23, 2004 @ 12:21 pm
Hi Actually I am supposed to do a similar project
The gateway to IEEEXplore
But only difference is that v have one login at our institute and
I want to make it available to multiple users scattered in the campus. Can you help me please !
Comment by Lokesh Kumar — November 10, 2004 @ 1:28 pm
Well, I’m not sure hoe legal it is to just allow everyone access like that. But you should be able to just create the tunnel I mentioned above, then tell people to browse to your system as i it were a web server. Since ssh is port-forwarding port 80, you’re esentially making your system a web server that looks like IEEE.org!
Comment by Gudlyf — November 10, 2004 @ 1:35 pm