The business I work for has a website for employees to clock in and out of their work shifts.
This website needs to be only accessible from our two in-house iPads. I tried doing a simple .htaccess password protection to the directory, but every time the browser is closed (which is often), we need to re-input the password.
I thought about limiting access to the iPads' IP addresses (also with .htaccess), but they have dynamic IP's so that doesn't work either.
What other solutions are there? Is there a way to make a website device-specific regardless of IP? A way to somehow "catch" the range of an iPad's dynamic IP's?
I am a newbie with PHP so please be clear with your answers. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Best Answer
I'm going to go ahead and preach the VPN option. All you have to do is setup a small and simple OpenVPN server and the web server. Generate certificates for each iPad, then allow only the IPs from the VPN to access the website in question.
OpenVPN can be hard at first but once you start playing around with it, it should rapidly get simpler.
The solution mentioned by Arenstar only works if there is no NAT between the iPad's and the server.
I believe you do need a jailbroken iPad to install GuizmOVPN. It works really well. My boss uses his iPad to SSH into our servers and he's satisfied. The configuration of GuizmOVPN is not as simple as it should be but the tutorial on the website is rather clear.