AOL 6 and proxy access problems?

[JQ Johnson]

It should be noted that it is completely legitimate for a provider such as 
AOL or @Home to require the use of their local proxy server.  The primary 
purpose of proxy servers is to improve performance, and the network design 
may be such that the only way to achieve acceptable performance for users 
on the remote network is a local proxy server.  In the @Home case, for 
instance, the original design was to place proxy, mail, and news servers in 
each local community (not even at what might be a rather distant border of 
the @Home network and the public Internet), and to require use of the local 
server so that your use wouldn't unfairly impact your neigbor's.  And, of 
course, a network provider may need to require the use of a proxy server 
for security reasons; if our patrons are connecting to us from inside a 
corporate network this will often be the case.

Given that it may be necessary for our patrons to use the ISP-provided 
proxy server, what's a library to do?  Some libraries have gone the 
"rewriting proxy server" route, while others of us have decided that that's 
too fraught with incompatibility perils.  Others blame the ISP or provide 
special, hard-to-maintain, access for patrons in this sort of situation 
(e.g. an SSL tunnel for all traffic from the patron's machine to campus). 
Should we just tell our remote patrons "sorry, you're SOL"?

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/