News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
CUNY CIS will be doing scheduled maintenance work on Saturday, May 20, to the CUNY Login system between 10 AM and 3 PM. During this time, users may not be able to:
UPDATE (9:35 AM): Remote access is now working again. The issue may have been due to an expired certificate.
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I am investigating why our remote access via the CUNY Login isn’t working. Once you enter your CUNY Login credentials, you see an error page from CUNY that says:
An error occurred: ActionExecutionException
I’ve submitted a ticket to the CUNY OLS Help Desk to see if the problem is affecting all the CUNY campuses that use the CUNY Login for remote access or not. Oddly enough, if you log into your user account in OneSearch, which also uses the CUNY Login system, there aren’t the same problems we’re seeing with remote database access.
I’ll update this post as I get more information.
Update (2 pm, Feb. 17, 2023): The problem detailed below has been resolved.
On the EZproxy mailing list today, I was alerted to a problem that everyone is having with remote access to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Chronicle of Higher Education on the publisher’s website. Off campus users, will be connected to those sites via a link going through our proxy server, will see an error message along the lines of “This web property is not accessible via this address.” The error seems to be connected to the Cloudflare service, something that has come up occasionally with databases we access that also use the Cloudflare service for content delivery.
On campus access is unaffected.
As a workaround for remote users, we do have access via other databases, but those tend to have embargoes on the last month’s content:
UPDATE (27 February 2023) Access to journal issues from the past three years has been restored. If you encounter any further issues, please report them to [email protected]
ORIGINAL POST
I’ve got a support ticket in with Wiley to find out why a large number of the journals we should have access to on the Wiley platform won’t let us view full text (I’ve also contacted our Wiley sales rep). The problem seems to be limited to issues from 2020 to the present. As soon as I hear back from Wiley, I’ll post another update here.
If a student or faculty member sees this error message when trying to remotely connect to library resources, please always refer them directly to the BCTC Help Desk or SPS Help Desk:
This is the only remote access error page that has this yellow box on it and that has this unique message:
ERROR: This account doesn’t include remote access to library services from off-campus.
The user should be instructed to contact the BCTC Help Desk or SPS Help Desk and make sure that they clearly communicate that they are seeing this specific error message (this is essential to solving this problem). The user should be encouraged to share a screenshot of that error page or to copy the text of the unique message on it. The BCTC Help Desk or CUNY SPS Help Desk staff will then in turn reach out to the CUNY CIS help desk for help with this, as this is an issue that needs to be fixed in the CUNYfirst system.
In theory, this error message is one that is only supposed to appear when someone has a CUNY Login but no remote access to library databases (such as an alumni), but it seems that the systems that manage identities in the CUNYfirst system can get out of sync, and students who should have access will sometimes see this message.
If you’re not sure how to handle these situations, feel free to send an email to [email protected] (which Mike, Florencia, and I all monitor).
Datasets on WRDS will be unavailable on Wednesday, January 11, from 8 AM – 11 AM for planned maintenance by the vendor.
This is affecting both off campus and on campus access, as our EZproxy system isn’t able to load the login pages for our off campus users and our on campus users can’t get past any proxied link because the EZproxy system isn’t available.
I have a ticket into BCTC but haven’t been able to get any more info yet on whether network issues may be affecting our access to the EZproxy server.
Workarounds (only available for on campus users)
If you are are on campus, you can still get to our proxied resources as follows:
Example: You want to go to Academic Search Complete. Copy the link to the database and paste it into Notepad. The URL will like this:
https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=a9h
Delete the portion at the front that begins with https://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=
That leaves you with something you can copy and paste back into your browser as long as you are on campus:
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=a9h
2 June 2022 update: This issue has been resolved (EBSCO’s new URL for its OpenURL service needed to be shared with Ex Libris and set up in Alma for all Ex Libris customers).
Links going from OneSearch to EBSCOhost databases are failing, generating a “connection timed out” message that, depending on your browser, will look something like this one from Firefox:
This problem has occurred in the past (see this August 2021 blog post) and then got fixed by EBSCOhost. As a workaround, when you are in OneSearch dand need to get to an item that is on an EBSCOhost database, use our A-Z database list to go to the main search page for that database and do a search to find that specific item in the relevant database.
The more details we have about where the user was when they clicked a link that failed to work for them, the better we can troubleshoot the problem and decide whether it’s something the library needs to fix or whether it’s a username/password problem that the user needs to get help with from the BCTC Help Desk or the CUNY SPS Help Desk (or use the password recovery/reset features when appropriate). If a user says that they can’t log into something, please try to get as many details as you can, especially if it sounds like something you’ll need to notify Mike or me about.
Is the error screen coming from a Baruch or a CUNY page or are you seeing on a page from the database/resource (alternately, can you give me the web address for the page that’s saying you can’t log in or send me a screenshot?)
What specifically did you click on before you got a logon page? Was it something in OneSearch? If so, what was the specific item? Or was it a link on the library website (including our A-Z databses page)? If so, what was the link and what was the library web page where that link is found?
Were you trying to get into something on e-reserve? If so, what was the specific item and what class is it for (instructor and course number)? Is it the course password that you can’t get past or did you get past that but now can’t access some specific item put on reserve?
UPDATE: As of 1:30 PM, access has been restored. Details on this new blog post.
Thanks to alerts on the EZproxy mailing list this morning, I learned that Factiva access is down. I’m not sure that the problem is but once you log in, you get this error message on a Factiva page:
We are unable to process your request at this time. Please try again in a few minutes.
Error: 210905
Server: AWSPFWAPPS07
I’ve added a “temporarily unavailable” note to the database link in LibGuides. As soon as access is restored, I’ll post an update on the blog.