Comment: Struggles

Mark, if you want your employees to access internal and local information, you should:

• plug one YACS server at each location into your intranet, to let people access/share information from within the company

• arrange some IPsec solution (eg, Checkpoint, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) to let roaming employees access internal resources, including YACS servers, from the outside (ie, Internet)

The only thing I have to add to YACS to fulfill your requirement is a global parameter to block cross-authentication between servers (roughly, about one hour development time...)

Generally speaking, I would recommend to not push on the Internet information that have to stay within company boundaries.

This being said, if you really want to do it differently, please consider first that HTTP basic authentication and cookie-based session management is not as secured as an IPsec tunnel.

Still wanting to build your intranet across the Internet? Well, create one server per location, and make it hosted as near as possible of related location. Then you will use the global parameter mentioned previously to avoid cross-authentication.

Also, I would have to add a global parameter to limit member rights to read access. Another hour development time, maximum.

Of course you will end up with several servers to manage, but YACS has very specific features aiming to reduce related management costs:

• You should create a company-wide reference server, to share and update your company skin, plus specific software development you would have. Software updates would be achieved from all locations against this reference server.

• Use the RSS monitoring feed to consolidate into your newsreader all events received from all servers.

I will try to integrate the two new configuration parameters discussed above into the next release, and will send you a message when the next build will be available, hopefully before week end.

Thank you for having stated your issue so clearly, and for giving YACS a chance to support your business.