[WEB4LIB] Weird Extranet problem

[James Klock]

At 05:20 PM 2/7/99 -0800, Spober at manhattan.edu wrote:
>...now we find that one of the vendors (UMI's ProQuest 
>Direct service) we get via Extranet is apparently not coming through the 
>Extranet at all.  I had assumed this was due to a lack of DNS when the 
>campus Internet connection was down.  However, I was wrong.
>Using the URL:  http://www.umi.com/pqdauto the error message [appears]...
>Using the numeric URL that is the equivalent of the above address
>(http://192.195.245.135/pqdauto) the error message [appears]...
>Using the numeric IP:  http://192.195.245.140 we can get to a generic UMI
>page, but ...

Aha!

UMI, being a subscription server, wants to convince themselves that the
requests for information that they are serving are coming from people who
are paying for it.  One of the ways that they do this is by confirming the
IP # of the requesting machine.  We, for example, have told them to allow
connection from any machine in the 207.227.130.* subnet.  
http://www.umi.com/pqdauto  is, if memory serves, the URL through which UMI
authenticates IP numbers before sending traffic on to the data.  
It sounds like what's happening is that when you try to contact UMI via
your Extranet connection, your IP number is not the same as when you go
through your campus Internet connection.  

My suggestion: contact your Extranet provider, and find out from them what
IP number your outgoing traffic uses.  If they are assinging you a dynamic
IP number from a pool, you may have a problem.  If not, the easiest thing
to do is to tell UMI to enable access from the IP number(s) that your
Extranet connection uses.  Our experience has been that UMI is quite
reasonable about allowing customers to register whatever range of IP
numbers they wish.

As for the fact that Netscape responds with the same message regardless of
what you do-- that's probably just because Netscape responds with that
message pretty much any time it can't connect to a remote server,
regardless of what the real problem is...  :P

Good luck!

James