ACCESS CONTROL FOR USERS OF CAN-8 SERVERS

To provide control over where licensed connections to CAN-8 servers originate from, an access control system has been implemented. The access controls allow the server administrator to allocate a specific number of licenses to a range of IP addresses. In this way, the server administrator may reserve a number of licenses for use in a classroom thus preventing others from outside the classroom from using them.

SETTING-UP THE ACCESS CONTROL

To setup the access controls, the server administrator must create a text file called ACCESS.CFG in the SVSYS\ID directory on the server. The contents of this file are as follows.
The first line defines the number of licensed connections the server may support.
This number must match exactly with the number of licenses that have been purchased from Sounds Virtual. If this number does not agree, the server will either allocate licenses that will not connect, or never connect licenses that do exist. The form of this line is below:

license 40

In this case the server was licensed for 40 connections. There is one space between the word "license" and the number.
The remaining lines all take the same form. There may be up to 200 such lines in the file.
The form is as follows:

[starting IP address][whitespace][ending IP address][whitespace][number]

The fields are as follows:

Field	Description
whitespace	One or more space characters
starting IP address	First IP address (inclusive) of the range
ending IP address	Last IP address (inclusive) of the range
number	Number of licenses to allocate to the range

A typical line would look like this:

10.0.0.1 10.0.0.250 10

The above line allocates 10 possible connections to the range of addresses starting at 10.0.0.1 and up to and including 10.0.0.250.

The access control list works on a "pool" basis. The starting pool is the number of licenses specified in the "license nn" line. Each allocation line reserves licenses from this pool. When all the allocation lines have been read, any remaining licenses may be used from any location.

Going back to our simple example file:

license 40
10.0.0.1 10.0.0.250 10

In this case, the server is capable of 40 licensed connections. Ten of those addresses are reserved for the range of IP address 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.250. You will note that there are a possible 250 IP addresses that may use up to 10 connections. This does not mean that only 10 users may sign on from those addresses, but that a MINIMUM of 10 users may ALWAYS sign on from those addresses. If users attempt to sign on from a reserved range that has exceeded its allocation of addresses, then remaining licenses are allocated from the unreserved pool (in this case 40 - 10 = 30 licenses). Thus users are not prevented from signing on in the reserved range, only that a minimum are guaranteed to sign on.

Lets consider a more realistic and complex example:

license 35
10.0.0.1 10.0.0.250 10
10.0.1.0 10.0.1.250 10
172.16.32.1 172.16.32.250 10


In this case, three ranges are reserved, each having ten licenses allocated to them. So this means that a minimum of 10 users may sign on to the server from each of the ranges. The remaining number of licenses from the total is five. These five may be used from any IP address including addresses within the range of allocated addresses.

EXTENDED FORMAT

GENERAL NOTES