IP range formatting

[geirrosset]

So I need to open up a journal to a School which has a long list of IP addresses and ranges. But OJS tells me to enter a valid IP range. Can I not use the format 123.123.1-50.*? Not being able to do this would mean entering 50 strings for just this one entry, and we have several of them. Other option is to open up 123.123.*.* in which case I do not know who owns 123.123.51-255.*

Regards
Geir Rosset
Oslo
Norway

[asmecher]

Hi Geir,

From the system text:

If IP ranges are entered here, the domain is optional.<br />Valid values include an IP address (e.g. 142.58.103.1), IP range (e.g. 142.58.103.1 - 142.58.103.4), IP range with wildcard '*' (e.g. 142.58.*.*), and an IP range with CIDR (e.g. 142.58.100.0/24).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[geirrosset]

Yes I should have been more specific. How do I avoid having to enter 50 IP ranges to cover 123.123.1-50.* and at the same time not open the journal to whoever owns 123.123.51-255.*? Any other way of entering 123.123.1-50.*?

[asmecher]

Hi geirrosset,

Unfortunately not; each single range entry needs to be contiguous.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[geirrosset]

So let me refresh this topic a bit. A subscriber gave us an IP range formatted as: 123.123.*.*

OJS will not let us enter this. It can't possibly mean that we need to enter 123.123.1.* ........ 123.123.255.*, or to put it into words, create 255 entries before it's accepted? Which would take a
LOOOOOONG time.

Rather worried regards from Oslo

Geir

[bdgregg]

Geir,

If you are indeed covering the range from 123.123.*.* the best way to write this is using CIDR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIDR_notation which would be 123.123.0.0/16. However, if you are not covering the whole range you may be able to use some other CIDR format to cover your range. Or use a combination of formats to cover your range. There are a few CIDR calculators available on the internet http://www.subnet-calculator.com/cidr.php to help with your ranges. But I expect that maybe contacting the School in question's networking department might be somewhere to start to help resolving your range issues as they may already have a CIDR notation for the same ranges that they could make available to you.

We have a number of journals that have run into the same issue you are having and we have had to make many entries to cover their ranges. So having a large number of entries should be expected where the number of ranges is fairly complex. What seems to be a simple range translated to a software solution turns out to be fairly complex considering the number of ways that simple range can be written/re-written and understood by us humans.

I hope what I've provided helps you find a suitable solution.

[michael]

Hi Geir,

You should be able to enter your range as 123.123.1.0 - 123.123.50.255

Cheers,
Michael

[michael]

Hi Geir,

So let me refresh this topic a bit. A subscriber gave us an IP range formatted as: 123.123.*.*

OJS will not let us enter this.

This is a valid IP range and OJS should accept it as valid.

If you are copy-and-pasting IP range values from another source, e.g. Word doc, HTML email, etc. please ensure that no additional characters are being pasted into the IP input box. For example, the range character '-' should be the minus char, not a long dash '--' If in doubt, simply type it in manually.

If you still experience issues, please do let us know (with OJS version, DB, etc.).

Cheers,
Michael

[bricas]

We're also having a problem with IP validation (institutional subscribers). For some reason even existing values fail the validation. We ended up commenting out the validation check entirely to get it to work.

FWIW, we're using OJS 2.3.8 on MySQL 5.2.13 (OpenSUSE).

Obviously, this isn't a good long-term solution and we'd like to debug & fix it ASAP. Should I file a bug report, perhaps?

-Brian