We're running Plone for internal departmental use. I'm going to lock down most of the content, requiring a login to view sensitive documents. But I also want our Google Mini appliance to crawl all content. The problem is that the appliance does not accept cookies. So Plone and Zope don't recognize a user account as the crawler attempts to move through links.

I am thinking of granting the Google Mini appliance "transparent" access by reading the http headers of incoming requests and granting access if:

- the header includes the correct client string
AND

- The IP address of the requesting machine is owned by the Google Mini host.

Questions:

1) Is this approach viable? (What are the pitfalls?)

2) What python module is consulted to determine access rights when a page request is made?

2) Is this difficult to implement if one has rudimentary Python skills? (Or is there already sample code out there to do something like this? I couldn't find any.)