Help with firewalls

Firewalls block referral

The problem we hear of most often concerns home computers, normally with Norton firewalls. Even though a valid library card number and PIN has been entered, the online service still rejects access or asks for a further user name and password. This problem should only affect NetLibrary (e-books and eAudiobooks), Safari (e-books), and the Oxford English Dictionary Online.

One reason we have switched to library card login for most of our online services is to bypass this problem where possible.

Background

We have to pay a subscription for our e-books and online reference services and that subscription allows us to give access only to Richmond borough library members. Some of our service providers police this by checking the name of the web page you have just come from (or have been "referred" from - hence the technical term for this, "referrer URL").

Unfortunately, there is a feature of some personal firewalls that conflicts with this. These firewalls, as part of the default security measures they implement on your PC, don't tell web sites where you have been referred from. The services that rely on this information can't check you have come from a trusted Richmond web page and therefore won't let you in.

Solution

Firewalls recognise this as a potential restriction and it should be possible to configure them to allow the passing of referrer URLs to specific sites. This means you can keep the general security block in place, while allowing access to this information for specific sites that you trust.

For users of Norton Personal Firewall or Norton Internet Security configuration instructions are available in the support section of the Symantec web site.

The site names for our affected services are as follows. Note: you typically tell the firewall the names of the trusted sites you want to go to, not the ones you are coming from.