Subject: Re: Authentication and Site Licences and the JANET cache
Judy Campbell (J.Campbell@library.usyd.edu.au)
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 08:12:32 +1100
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990222081232.00934de0@postbox.library.usyd.edu.au> Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 08:12:32 +1100 To: arl-ejournal@arl.org From: Judy Campbell <J.Campbell@library.usyd.edu.au> Subject: Re: Authentication and Site Licences and the JANET cache In-Reply-To: <199902182234.RAA15646@nber.nber.org>
On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> wrote:
>
> We publish a series of research reports that are available to
> subscribers over the web. We use IP address based authentication.
> Lately I have had quite a few messages from England about failed
> authentication. I would appreciate comments on the boilerplate that
> I send in reply to such messages. Here it is:
>
>
> Question:
>
> Why can't I access the full text of papers? My university is a
> subscriber.
>
> Answer:
>
> The problem is that traffic from English universities now goes through a
> cache engine in the domain wwwcache.ja.net. Since this computer covers
> all English universities, I can't put it in our authorization database.
> We never get a query directly from your computer or your university
> cache - every query comes from the Janet engine.
>
> If you have any contacts at the network services office of your
> university, you could ask them to modify the ACL on their cache engine
> so as not pass on requests for http://nberws.nber.org/ to the off-campus
> cache engine. It is fine for them to cache those pages themselves, of
> course.
>
> One proposed solution, which works for some sites, is to browse a
> special web server we have set up on port 81 of our web server. The
> user would then browse:
>
> http://nberws.nber.org:81/papers/w0000.pdf
>
> (where 0000 is the paper number) to actually down load the paper. I
> understand that some sites passs port 81 to the off-campus cache,
> defeating this strategy. If any significant usage were to develop
> on this port, we would modify our server to automatically recognize
> requests from Janet, and automatically specify port 81 in HTML
> returned to those sites. This would make the procedure completely
> user-transparent. However at this time there are no regular users of
> this server.
>
> If you want to make this subscription work, I suggest going to the
> library staff person in charge of online publications. If you can
> convince that person there is an issue here, he can refer it to your
> network services group as a serious issue worthy of attention. I have
> no access to your network services group, and cannot make anything
> happen there. If they have an alternative proposed solution, and it
> requires action at my end, I will cooperate. But the proposed solution
> must be for a site license scheme, not a login-id/password scheme
> (unless someone at your end will handle the paperwork).
>
> The alternative that I have suggested in the past is for Janet to
> enable the 'X-Forwarded-for:' header for requests. This would give
> us the IP address of the original requester, and we could authorize
> or not according to our database. Once we so authorized, Janet could
> service the request from the cache database minimizing overseas line
> charges. However, Janet has made a policy decision not to provide
> that header, to enhance privacy.
>
> I really want to make this work, and am very open to suggestions. If
> anyone at Janet will contact me, I would be glad to work with them to
> find a solution.
>
> This brings up a delicate point. If a university feels that it wants a
> subscription to our service, but does not want to identify itself when
> making requests, it is very difficult for us to respond. We are willing
> to go halfway in this matter, but some cooperation from the University
> (or its agent, Janet) will be required to make progress in this matter.
Why do you assume that the librarian is male?
Judy Campbell
________________________________________________________________
Judith Campbell Ph: (02) 9351 2173
Associate Librarian (Branch Libraries)
University of Sydney Library Fax (02) 9351 7765
________________________________________________________________
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