What is the cost for your website security?
NetBrood IP Safe is an easy to use module for your DotNetNuke web site. It can be used to restrict access to some IP addresses, redirect them or serve some content or a file.Was something missing from DotNetNuke and now is available for you.
Why this is useful?
For the safety of your portal, your online presence or your business!
Do crawlers visit your website? Have you tried to use robot.txt to instruct web robots not to visit some of the heavy pages in your web site and failed?
With DotNetNuke? Well... it uses dynamically created pages and URLs does not correspond to actual physical paths.
Do you want to limit the usage of your web portal inside the IP range of your companies' addresses?
You can restrict access to registered users, having configured properly user groups and roles, but how can you restrict access to your UNREGISTERED visitors?
Do you want to be able to prevent DoS (Denial of Service) attacks... for "persistent visitors" (or bots) requesting pages of your website, and as a result your portal being slow?
These are some very important questions, and if they ever concerned you, then maybe you should have a look at our DotNetNuke Module NetBrood IP Safe.
So if you answered yes to any of the above questions, then IP Safe can be an easy-to-use and inexpensive solution for you to furnish your DotNetNuke website!
Also with its integrated log analytic, we manage to create a better logging subsystem for your DotNetNuke portal and you, when you want to extract detailed and DETAILED INFORMATION (not just data) about those who visit your website.
IP handling is performed in the lower communication stack (3rd level). This kind of handling is performed usually by the system administrators; they define black-white list with IP addresses which can connect to the machine running the web-server. While administrators block access in general to the machine, by closing TCP ports, they permit connection to the web server for clients to connect and perform requests. Since the web server port is always open - for serving web pages - this is also the disadvantage; your web portal is open to DoS or similar "visits" that consume your precious resources.
Most essential resources - and specially those connected to the privacy of your users or clients - are on your web server. Another important issue is your usage bandwidth and the "traffic limit" you may have from your hosting provider. That bandwidth can be consumed in a matter of seconds by a persistent crawler, web spiders, bots or whatever web clients that traverse your entire website. This could be for malicious reasons such as trying to crack your website, or maybe just for indexing its content. But this also could make us being suspicious; what is a search engine doing in my website, since I did not invited it; or I am not benefited from its service?
This was an actual incident with one of our clients; she said: "I do not have a presence in China, neither i sell something there, so why is Baidu (the Chinese Search Engine) traversing my website; Who submitted my website there; How can i stop it?"
Also in the later case, the bot is stealing your something from your precious resources such as network bandwidth or web server processing capabilities, making your website slow to legitimate users or your business clients. Making your users to suffer a slow website experience.
So, having all these in your mind, don't you think there are times you wish to block some "persistent clients"?
IP safe is a module like any other DotNetNuke module. You can place it to a page and/or copy it to other pages in order to protect the pages where it is used. Also you can use it to display the client details, such as its browser and IP address, to the visiting user and/or log the visiting page. Its basic functionality is to restrict access (block), redirect, serve a file or a content (text) to clients identified by their IP addresses.
This way you can have one extra tool in your administrative toolbox to increase the safety of your website and use it as a responsible administrator of your website.
The module has minimal user interface, actually this is an extra feature, displaying connected client property
it is easy to put it in action with simple settings:
Enable IP Safe will enable the IP Safe module functionality.
Display Client properties check, allows you to display the browser name and IP address for the connected user. Unckecking it though, it will not display anything and will allow module to work in stelth mode (if you check the Enable IP Safe check box).
Log Client Properties check boc will enable the module to collect and log connecting users' properties in order for you to extract detailed analytics for you portal users. So enable this check box, add this module to all pages in your portal and collect analytics data for any user that visits your portal. You may be supprised from the detailed results and the numbers of spiders visiting your website.
Also there is an easy interface to module functionality and Actions management:
Also user privacy is still there, all registered users with edit permission on the module
are allowed to manage their IP action entries
You can block, redirect connecting users based on their IP address, if belong to the defined IP address range, to serve them some static content (that can be the content of a web page or a text file) or a file for download.
Now, we have integrated a powerful logging system, based on connected client properties. This way the module logs properties such as:
- the visited portal - this is useful when having multiple portals in one DotNetNuke installation. Of course all portals are available only to host superuser. Authorized users can see statistics for their portal.
- the visited page - authorized user can see statistics for the page he has permission, while administrator can see details for any page.
- the visiting user - authorized users can see statistics for themselves and other registered - unregistered DotNetNuke users.
- browser settings (such as the browser name, version, client's screen resolution etc). Screen resolution of the connected client - in order to apply a better skin for your web site.
- the advanced search allows to find out entry (and exit pages) in you web site - these are pages the user first entered (last visited) in your portal
- the application settings - if ip safe module performed some action on the client, the captured log type, etc.
- you can also limit results based on time etc
we have expanded the search form for you to see the details on which you can extract your results.
You can use the search form to filter logged results.
Remarks:
- Using this module, to log visits, one can get an approximation of the speed the connected client get pages from your website. This way you may identify heavy pages and take proper actions - see bellow.
- Authorized users are permitted to delete their log entries but only administrators can delete any log entry.
- Also due to restrictions users can see only their logged user name on the pages they visited - while administrators see user ids and page ids for all the pages in the portal.
Based on the above remarks, you can enable this module for your portal registered users, that have permissions, in order to provide them analytic about your portal and their pages, directly, without any effort - e.g. without having to extract any other external analytic data, such as from Google Analytic.
For example: if you have a page where you advertise one of your customers, you can allow your customers to view details about page visits, by providing them a registered user account with permission to this module. This way you can convince them about the supremacy of your portal.
Bellow is another example of the analysis for our website's visits. We clearly see the difference between Client and Server log type. Because not all visitors are actual (real) users. While Google Analytics (or others analytics providers) collects analytics for visiting clients, using our logging feature you can collect either type, based on the visiting client - the module ensures you that you will collect the most feature rich analytics data set.
Also, for an actual user (Client type) you can easily see the pages he/she visited and in which sequence. While Google Analytics reports 4.3 pages/visit and other aggregated data, using this module you extract detailed data, and know exactly how many pages, a user visited and what those pages are (among others). Using the search form above, you can extract meaningful analytics for your website, you users' preferences etc.
Also there is a possibility to display aggregated results in more formatted manner as displayed bellow:
The fields support also localized templates for formatting.
IP Safe Logging is a really powerful feature for IP Safe. Using it properly you can have a tool to distinguish those “persistent clients“ that visit frequently your website. Also extract meaningful analytics data for your web portal.
If you are still interested for your portal security check a demo in NetBrood.com website and check the latest release notes. Also registered users can check how the module works in Our Demo Page, without having to install anything on their websites.
So, if you are interested in more details, you can:
