Security

The only was that I can think of is to have the off campus students dail into a RAS server at the college. Then they will look like they are on campus as they go out to the internet on the normal colleage network.

You would have to setup a RemoteAccess Server with multiple modems to handle the traffic.

There are several ways to do this. The very first that I can think of is restrict is create and extranet by which users would have to authenticate with a domain or NIS structure. This could easily be accomplished by VPN software from some of the major security and NOS vendors. The second would be as stated in previous reply set a Remote Access Server for this pupose. IP address would be assigned to by the RAS box. There are many options at your disposale your ISP should also be able to help youset up a extranet that links the INTER to the INTRA.

I would opt for the RAS solution - less expensive and not as complicated to set up and maintain.

Although your ISP discourages a Proxy you could accomplish what your are looking for easily with MS Proxy and RRAS. You use Proxy for security and RRAS for VPN and then all of the students use their PPTP (comes with Win98,NT4,W2K) client and then they authenticate to the NT domain.

85% off campus means a lot of modems and phone lines for dial-in RAS. IP authentication is the problem here. So get rid of it. I'm sure a good Java programmer can write an applet to authenticate by username/password (when you login to techrepublic you just do that) and give access to the database. Maybe even the database providers can replace the IP based auth module with a username/password auth module. This may seem the cheapest way.