Help with IP addresses for institutional subscriptions

About IP addresses

An IP address is the numeric address of a computer connected to the Internet. The IP address is sometimes also known as the Internet address. On most networks, each computer has its own IP address. An IP address is not the same as a domain name or an e-mail address.

To activate your subscription to OED Online, you will need to give us those IP addresses which both uniquely identify the eligible machines on your network and allow access only to authorized users of your subscription. All IP addresses contain 4 numeric segments, separated by periods. A segment is either a number, an asterisk (wildcard), or a range specified by a dash (-). See example below.

Please make sure you've correctly identified all needed IP addresses. Those using addresses not registered will not have access to OED Online.

Some institutions use proxy servers to network their environment. This means that all the IP addresses of the computers people are using appear to the OED Online server as a single IP address. If your institution uses a proxy server, please ensure that the proxy server is used only by your institution. If it is, please enter it as part of your subscription. If the proxy server is used by people not covered by your OED Online subscription, please contact us to work out a solution.

How to describe a set of IP addresses

When listing a set of IP addresses to register them for OED Onnine access, follow these rules:

• The only characters allowed are numbers, dashes (-), and asterisks (*)
• No segments of an IP address can be blank.
• The allowed values for the first segment are 1-223.
• The allowed values for segments 2, 3, 4 are 0-254.
• The first segment cannot contain a range (-).
• The first and second segments cannot contain a wildcard (*).
• The third and fourth segments cannot both contain a range (-).

Example

This example uses both the wildcard character (*) and the range character (-):

"Educational University" is a big, complex University. For this institution to sign up for OED Online, 4 different IP addresses are required. The main IP address and three department subnets which are not part of the "main IP address" but are on the same campus:

This is how they would list their IP addresses:

10.175.4.*

128.67.49.*

114.18.70-109.*

156.56.78.77-145

(Note that these IP addresses are examples only, and will not work.)