Document Delivery: No Longer Dangerous
We’ve had a strange issue that has popped up lately, where patrons who are off campus get security notices that Document Delivery might be a dangerous site! (shudder!)
Mary and I have been working on trying to find the problem, but haven’t found much. We’re not sure if it’s a certificate clash between OCLC’s Illiad and EZProxy, but OCLC hasn’t had any successful fixes for us. While talking about it this afternoon, Mary and I realized that the problem comes from the Link Resolver adding the proxy URL to the document delivery link. I looked through the Serials Solutions Client Center, but didn’t see any setting for that. The link is actually a custom one that the Serials Solutions folks hard-coded into our link resolver back in the stone age, so it didn’t surprise me that it wasn’t an option in the admin console.
But, while we investigate the problem further, I added a little band-aid that will hide the problem from (most) patrons. When our customization script runs on the link resolver, I just run a little test on the link for Document Delivery, and if it contains “exproxy”, I just rewrite the URL to go straight to Illiad. (For the technically curious the code is right here.)
A few folks have suggested some changes to EZProxy, including Witt M’s suggestion to NeverProxy the Illiad domain, something we are looking in to. We’ll keep you updated on the fix as we find something, but hopefully this won’t affect too many patrons now.