Secure Channel Failure in the Link Checker
Recently, the E-book vendor ProQuest has come out with a new E-book platform called E-book Central. We changed a bunch of the old ebrary and EBL links to the new system, and now the Link Checker is marking them as “Secure Channel Failure.” Is this happening to anyone else? By all indications (that we know of) the links are still working, but it would be good to get rid of it if possible.
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Hi Noah, I just saw this on another library's link checker, but it wasn't for ebooks, it was for regular articles. I'm continuing to investigate and will let you know what I find out.
Just a head's up that I'm still working on this.
This is what we found with the other library that was experiencing issues with links to articles:
- The links originally used http
- When the link checker went to the link, it reached a landing page and was redirected to https. This caused the error because the link checker was expecting to establish a connection through http, not https. The landing page came up because the link was not the full link to the actual article.
For example, this was the link that was provided originally: http://www.forbes.com/sites/collegeprose/2013/06/24/the-hidden-work-life-of-university-faculty/
The user is brought to a page where they have to click through to continue to the article.
The recommendations are to use https in the original links when they are entered into Ares, and also to make sure that the entire link is included in Ares, which will prevent redirection to the landing page. So this link works fine with the link checker: https://www.forbes.com/sites/collegeprose/2013/06/24/the-hidden-work-life-of-university-faculty/#29ba1b0e2168
Please contact us at support@atlas-sys.com if this doesn't solve the problem on your end, so that we can look more closely at your resources in the link checker.
And I have yet another update to this issue. The above description does not apply to other links that we've looked at. For those links, we found that the issue could also be caused by whichever remote server the resource lives on if that remote server returns any "Secure" error to the Ares web server. So in those cases, it doesn't matter if https and the full link are used; Ares receives a message from the remote server that there is a 'Secure' failure. Here is an article about the "Secure Channel Failure" message in general: https://www.itprotoday.com/strategy/understanding-and-detecting-secure-channel-problems
If you are seeing these messages for the same sites over and over, you could add the site domain(s) to the System - Link Checker - LinkCheckerIgnore Domains key in the customization manager.
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