I did read the meta page, but your explanation is much better and very helpful. Of course, the student can go log into another computer. That might be more annoying for us to deal with, or require a range block. At the same time, if the school is willing to find the students, then XFF might help. In this case, it sounds like they may be able to find the student anyway.
If the school is interested in XFF, I can provide them with these specifics.
Thanks again for this info.
-Aude
On 5/2/07, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
My suggestions for the school network admins and staff would be:
- Implement XFF headers and make sure students have to log in using a
unique user ID (easiest would be based on student number) before using school computers.
On the subject of XFF ("X-Forwarded-For") headers, I'd like to note a few important technical details that one should keep in mind:
- Having a proxy provide XFF headers isn't enough; the address of the
proxy also needs to be added to the list of trusted proxies that Wikimedia servers will accept such headers from. That's because such headers would otherwise be trivially easy to fake. To get an address added to the list, you can post a request on [[meta:Talk:XFF project]] or contact a developer with shell access (such as Tim Starling, who's been doing most of the work on the XFF project) directly.
[snip]
(This is all based on my understanding of the XFF implementation in
MediaWiki as it was when I last looked at it. If you find any incorrect or outdated information above, please correct me. To increase the odds of this happening, I've crossposted this to wikitech-l in addition to wikien-l.)
-- Ilmari Karonen
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