Dear Colleagues:
Lately we have experienced problems with some of our electronic resources,
including British Standards Online and two Proquest products, Criminal
Justice Periodicals Index and UK Newspapers. The problems consist of
totally erratic behaviour: sometimes a search produces no hits but if you
run the same search again, plenty of hits result. Passwords are recognised
on some occasions and not on others.
We've now determined the root of the problem. The electronic services in
question launched new interfaces recently and these interfaces are not
compatible with load-balancing or load-sharing proxy servers ... which are
in use here at MMU. We cannot change the configurations on our proxy server
system easily and, for security reasons, we cannot bypass the
network completely.
We can't be the only ones with this problem. Would anyone else with
load-balancing proxy servers and similar troubles, please get in touch and
let me know if you have found a solution.
Many thanks.
Mary Harrison
Research Support Librarian
Manchester Metropolitan University
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