Access to wihm.ucl.ac.uk

[ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk]

As I mentioned, access to the Wellcome Library catalogue from
the USA by telnet is still not working, I'm afraid.  I append
an explanatory message from the local network team explaining
the situation.  

I'm sorry for the delay; please be patient.

Dominik

--- Forwarded mail from R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk (Bob Lawrence)

>From R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk Mon Mar 14 12:03:26 1994
X-Sender: ccaarol at pop-server.bcc.ac.uk
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 1994 11:58:17 +0000
To: D.Wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk
From: R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk (Bob Lawrence)
Subject: Access to wihm.ucl.ac.uk
Cc: Advisory at ucl.ac.uk, A.Deacon at ucl.ac.uk, R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk

Dominik,

>The Wellcome Institute's library catalogue is supposed to be telnet-able
>at wihm.ucl.ac.uk, and indeed I am able to connect if I telnet from
>bcc.ts.  But telnet doesn't work from the USA.  Our users are getting
>the message "connection refused".  I got that message myself a few
>moments ago, when trying telnet from Harvard.  There must be something
>in the configuration of the telnet recieving process that is barring
>USA calls.
>
>Our users are keen to have access: we've been promoting the service
>quite actively.

Yes, this is a known "problem" and I'll be working on this shortly. A brief
bit of history:

Some four or five weeks ago we got wind of users in the US using our xigs
Telnet/X.29 convertor box as a "launch pad" for "attacks" on systems back
in the States - use of this box effectively "hid" their identity from admin
on the systems they were attacking. As a result, we restricted access to
this box to calling addresses (in both the Telnet and X.29 address spaces)
which were "owned" by UCL. This effectively barred calls in fromn the US.
Unfortunately the access control mechanisms have the knock-on effect of
similarly controlling "seamless" calls through the box to advertised
services. Now a telnet call to wihm.ucl.ac.uk is transparently forwarded
through the controlled device with the results you report, ie. you can call
wihm.ucl.ac.uk from ucl/bcc addresses but not from elsewhere.

I'm going to try to remove this bar on calls to wihm.ucl.ac.uk (ie. make it
unrestricted) while preserving current security "controls" for calls
EXPLICITLY made to xigs.ucl.ac.uk.

I'll keeped you posted on this.

Apologies for any inconvenience, etc,

Bob

                      __o        o__
Bob Lawrence        _ \<._      _.>/ _
                   (_)/ (_)    (_) \(_)

E-mail: Internet: R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk
E-mail: JANET   : R.Lawrence at uk.ac.ucl
Phone :           +44 (0)71 380 7829




--- End of forwarded message from R.Lawrence at ucl.ac.uk (Bob Lawrence)