[Athen] Sharing Jaws and Zoomtext licenses Across Subnets?

[Al Puzzuoli]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the reply.  My concern is that these machines are scattered across buildings, in different labs throughout campus. I am therefore worried about firewall and security issues, as well as preserving the integrity of our licenses. . For example in the case of Zoomtext, I wouldn’t mind exposing a shared folder to everyone in a small office setting; However doing so on a campus wide level makes the me with the IT hat cringe in terror.

Similar concerns with Jaws. If I were to just open the appropriate ports to the world, anyone who knew the right IP could set their machine to access the server. I guess there’s a lot of security to be had through obscurity, so the odds of that happening are rather small but still … Not sure how to do this without a lot of complicated firewall rules.
--Al


From: athen-bounces at athenpro.org [mailto:athen-bounces at athenpro.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Dell
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2011 1:18 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: Re: [Athen] Sharing Jaws and Zoomtext licenses Across Subnets?

For jaws do local installs instead of network installs of the program. Create a system environment variable with the name LSFOREHOST and variable that is the IP address of the license server on the computer u want jaws to run.
For zt create a generic user with read access to the zt folder  map the folder on the computer want zt to run  This should make the folder available to all users on the machine. If the server  is not on the use the IP of the server instead of the UNC for  zt server install and to map the folder.
Jeff

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 21, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Al Puzzuoli <alpuzz at msu.edu<mailto:alpuzz at msu.edu>> wrote:
At MSU, we are using server based licenses for most of our AT . Our primary network of labs spans the majority of campus. The labs are on their own network segment and the license servers work just fine. However, we are increasingly dealing with situations in which departments  have set up their own labs. In these scenarios, I’m not finding many  perfect solutions. We have enough concurrent licenses to go around, but no good way of distributing them.

The zoomtext license server is a joke when it comes to security. It requires that a shared folder be exposed and read, and I think also write permissions be granted to everyone. Definitely not something I would want to open up for campus wide use. I know there is a dongle based version of Zoomtext, but that introduces its own set of problems. First of all, I don’t feel that we should have to spend any more money because we have already bought the number of licenses we need. Then there are the headaches associated with keeping track of the dongles.

Jaws presents similar issues. I think the security is better on the Jaws license server, but I’m unsure  as to whether it can be effectively shared between subnets. I suppose it might be possible to set up some firewall rules wherein the proper ports are opened to certain IP addresses or certain subnets? Has anyone done this?
Thanks for any thoughts,


Al Puzzuoli

Information Technologist

Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities  517-884-1915  120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033 http://www.rcpd.msu.edu

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