WSS Admin Guide

Planning for IP Address-Based Groups

Note: To enter settings, you must have Add, Edit, and Authentication permissions for Manage Group.

You create IP groups and assign IP addresses to each group. The policy is applied to the traffic generated from the IP addresses. For IP groups, access to sites are allowed or blocked regardless of who in the account is surfing the web.

Key features of IP address-based groups

If you want a single IP group with a single policy for the entire account, the Default IP Group is ready to use. No additional configurations are required. The account's IP address range constitutes Default IP Group's 'members'. If you want more than one IP address-based group because you want different policies according to IP address, edit the Default IP Group first so that IP addresses are available for allocation to the other groups. As you have unique sets of users for each user-based group, you have unique sets of IP addresses for each IP address-based group.

Note: Record your IP address allocations in a separate file and have it on hand while creating multiple IP groups.

Policies with coached sites

For IP groups, use policies that don't include coached sites, because they require user authentication. For IP groups, coached sites are blocked. If you still want an IP group's policy to include coached sites, additionally create a user-based group and add users there. Then assign that same policy to the user group and the IP group. Inform your users about their login information (login name using the email address format and password) in case they are presented with the coach page. See also Creating Policies.