Just a short note to alert Mason affiliates that we’ve changed our database gateway service (aka our proxy server) in ways that should open up service for those of you behind network firewalls in your office, hospital or military installation.
If you use an older URL that contains the 2048 port, you have two options:
a) have your local network administrator open up port 2048 to our server (mutex.gmu.edu). Only that port and port 443 (which handles the secure signon). In all but the most unusual circumstance, you’ll find that port 443 is already opened (all secure web traffic moves on that port so network admins keep it open).
b) copy the URL, then paste it back in your browser and cut out the “:2048” portion of the URL.
At the moment, even though we’re changing our local URLs to move the initial login from port 2048 to port 80, you may well find URLs on a library site that begins like this:
http://mutex.gmu.edu:2048/login?URL=http://www.2facts.com
If so (and you’re behind a firewall that doesn’t have port 2048 open), make a copy of the URL and then remove the :2048 so it looks like this:
http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?URL=http://www.2facts.com
After we’ve run on this new configuration for a while (and verify that it causes no other spin-off issues), we’ll mount a full-scale hunt to track down and change any URL on a library server that points to port 2048 on our proxy server. We will continue to support URLs that contain the 2048 port syntax for many, many months so the transition to our new arrangement should be a non-event.