FirstSearch matters

[MacKenzie Smith]

Maybe this will clarify what happened a little... We haven't used the
OCLC supplied WebScript scripts in the past, preferring our own Tcl
creations to connect to EJO journals, but when we realized that OCLC
was about to break our scripts with less than a week's warning I got
busy looking at WebScript!  As far as I can tell, what OCLC changed
was the name of the FirstSearch/EJO web server.  When you now connect 
to www.ref.oclc.org:2000 (or www.ref2.oclc.org:200, and probably some
others), the server redirects your client to port 3050 on one of many
actual servers (medusa is one, bart another, around 5 in all).  The
change to the WebScript scripts was to handle that redirect and log you
on to the appropriate server in more or less the old way. Their ostensible 
reason for this change is that 5 servers are better than 1, especially 
when the load on the 1 becomes too large to manage...  Since I didn't 
care to reproduce this (undocumented) change in our Tcl script I just 
used their EJO script and added a TCL wrapper to do the local authentication 
and logging (and Tom, I'm surprised to hear _you_ advocating for IP-based 
authentication by OCLC!  At least this way we have a chance to let in our 
off-campus affiliates!).  So the bottom line is, whether or not you use 
the WebScript stuff you need to accomodate that initial redirection, and 
if you just connect directly to medusa:3050 (or one of the other new 
servers) then you're defeating the purpose of their "upgrade".

Now if only OCLC would have told us that to begin with!

_____________________________________________________________________________
MacKenzie Smith                                   mackenzie_smith at harvard.edu
Office for Information Systems                    (617)495-3724
Harvard University Library                        %\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%\%
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