World News Connection - Anyone Accessing?

[MacKenzie Smith]

> Acessing World News Connection (from NTIS in the Commerce Department)
> currently requires a password for each login.  We have three loginids.  In
> an e-mail message from their help desk I was told that they are working on
> "networked access"  - whatever they mean by that.  IP filtering would make
> me happy.  In the meantime, I've been pondering how to keep the passwords
> secure yet not require the gov. doc. folks to individually log a patron in
> each time.  At my level of CGI expertise, I can't do it although I intend to
> keep puttering with the problem.
> 
> Are any of you faced with the same problem?  What have you done?

Me again.  I just wrote a perl script last week to automate the logon
to WNC with our 4 logonid/passwords(!)  My technical contact there was 
very helpful, and said that they are indeed thinking about how to 
redesign the system to handle institutional accounts (the whole site 
was designed on the assumption that it would be used only by individuals), 
but that's probably a _long_ way off.  In the meantime, you can't use 
WebScript the way you're thinking because the NTIS CGI scripts don't 
know anything about that FUNC/LOGIN stuff... that's SiteSearch speak 
and no one speaks it but OCLC and its SiteSearch customers... My perl 
script (could have been Tcl just as easily) uses the unix lynx client 
to negotiate the logon and then hands off the session to the actual 
client.  It also does local authentication and logging using some Tcl 
routines that we developed.  There are still a few glitches with this 
scheme, but it's working pretty well for us.

Let me know if you'd like the script, and be sure to complain a lot
to NTIS so they'll fix their system soon!

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