IP addresses and Talis products

Talis Aspire talks to several systems and you will need to make sure that all our systems can talk to yours.

Introduction

This article is intended for use by library system managers and university network teams.

We assume that you have some familiarity with:

• Computer Networking

All of the IP addresses and IP address ranges in this article are required to be open to Talis for smooth operation of your Talis Aspire Reading Lists or Talis Aspire Digitised Content tenancies.

Network connections can either be inbound to your network or outbound from your network, and this article contains important information on both of these scenarios.

Inbound requests

This first section details IP addresses of connections that will be inbound into your or your vendor’s network.

Your library management system

Requests to your library system will be for library availability and catalogue record lookup. Typically these will be z39.50 services or vendor specific availability services.

The exact port numbers that these inbound requests will use will vary.

• ESS library management systems network ports
• Innovative Interfaces library management systems network ports
• Ex Libris library systems network ports
• SirsiDynix library management systems network ports
• Network Connections for FOLIO Systems

You may need to consult your local networks team and your library system vendor in order to make sure that requests are allowed through firewalls and also authorised to use the requested service.

If you need to know what connection strings Talis Aspire Reading Lists or Talis Aspire Digitised Content are using, then please raise a support ticket.

IP addresses

Ranges for Canada

IMPORTANT: Talis Aspire for Canada operates on separate infrastructure, so for Canadian institutions the following IP ranges need to be open:

Outbound IP addresses

Talis Aspire products are offered exclusively as Software as a Service (SaaS) which means that it is delivered to your users online.

One of Talis Aspire’s strengths is its ability to use a domain name of your choice so that it can be seamlessly integrated into your Institution’s domain space. For example: resourcelists.myinstitution.ac.uk

Talis Aspire is built on an ever-changing architecture which grows and scales to meet expectations from our customers. We use DNS routing to make sure that your choice of hosted domain always goes to the correct place which is both closest to you and scaled to suit demand. These are called application and content delivery networks.

It is a feature of these delivery networks that the actual IP address of the server that serves a request from your students or academics may change at any time.

Because of the flexibility of our software services, we are unable to give out IP addresses of servers that can be guaranteed to persist.

We know that some institutions have outbound firewall rules to route traffic through internal proxies if the domain name appears to be internal. If you do have to firewall or proxy outbound connections, then we strongly advise that firewall rules be based on domain names where possible.