Access denied when performing routine tasks

[jpapier]

Greetings,

We're using PWB v. 2.09.1 in a public library setting, on Windows XP Professional Dells, all of year-old vintage.

Recently we had two patrons trying to perform routine tasks on these URLS: www.jdate.com and www.hotwire.com

On Jdate, the patron was trying to use Jdate's built-in "email" to respond to a personal. On Hotwire, the patron was trying to check for flight availability.

On both occasions, the patrons received "Access denied" messages, which is what happens when someone on our public PCs tries to access a URL listed in our url.txt file.

They could get to these two URL's just fine. Only when they tried to do the above tasks did the problems occur. Nothing I could see in our list of denied URLs seemed to explain this behavior.

We're not disabling popups.

Scott, should I send you our url.txt and pwb.ini files?

Thanks,

Jeff Papier jpapier@sbpl.info
South Brunswick Public Library
Monmouth Junction, NJ

[Scott]

Jeff,

Set the [Security] DebugAccessString=True in your INI file. This will give you the exact URL that PWB is seeing and denying. You can use this URL to compare to your URL filter file.

If you want to send the URL, or the instructions to reproduce the denial, along with your URL filter file I can check it out.

--Scott

[jpapier]

Thanks, Scott. I'll try it this morning. A patron reported the same problem last night with Monster.com.

JP

[jpapier]

Scott,

This worked great. Turns out, in Hotwire at least, the search string has a c: in it (loc: to be precise). We block access to the C: drive with -c: in url.txt.

So I explicitly added +loc: before -c: and now Hotwire works, without giving access to the C: drive.

I'll keep the debug string on so that if this issue crops up again, we can zero in on the problem.

Many thanks as always, Scott!!

Jeff Papier