50124 - aps.org - Unable to access Physical Review Letters website

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P3)

Description

[Stephan C. Buchert]

I have paid subscriptions to on-line journals (Physical Review Letters of the
American Physical Society and also others). A long time ago I entered their
service for the first time and had to enter a password that was provided by
them. Since this first time I always had access to the journals without password
and I have lost by now this password (Netscape lacking this nice new password
manager). However, now, with Mozilla, I cannot get access to the journal
anymore, with Netscape 4.75 I, of course, still can.

Assuming that it is problem with cookies, I have copied the contents of
/home/scb/.netscape/cookies into /home/scb/.mozilla/default/cookies.txt. This
"import" of cookies seems to have been successfull, since I can list in the
Mozilla Preferences many cookies from sites that I have visited previously using
Netscape. But it didn't solve the problem with the journal subscription...

I guess I should ask the guys of the American Physical Society what kind of
identification is actually used in their service, but I thought I report the
problem to you anyway. Is it possible that Mozilla doesn't send the cookies that
I have "imported" from Netscape?

Comment 1

[Stephen P. Morse]

Manual copying of your cookies file should have worked so I don't know what the 
problem is.  However, there is an automatic way to convert your old 4.x profile 
into a mozilla profile (cookies.txt included).  I'm not sure how you do that but 
the profile-migration group should know.  Reassigning to them.

Comment 2

[Jeffrey Baker]

The proper invocation on Linux is "./mozilla -ProfileManager"

You should be prompted to import your old 4.x profile.  More choices are shown
with ./mozilla --help

Comment 3

[Ben Guthrie]

I note that I am unable to sign into my account at www.amazon.com using their 
"secure server".  Could this be the problem the "American Physical Society" site 
rather than the cookie?

Comment 4

[Stephen P. Morse]

Do you have cookies enabled?  Are you accepting all cookies and not just cookies 
that get sent back to original server?

Comment 5

[Stephen P. Morse]

If you are running the mozilla build (rather than the commercial netscape 
build), have you installed PSM?

Comment 6

[Grace Bush]

from reporter:

Thanks for your replies. I'm using a mozilla built and didn't install PSM
because I hadn't read about the Crypto stuff. This is probably the cause of
the problem. In case I still have problems after installing PSM I will submit
another bug report, ok?

resolve worksforme?

Comment 7

[Stephen P. Morse]

No, it's not works-for-me, but rather it's invalid.  It was due to the error on 
the part of the user of not having installed psm.

Comment 8

[Grace Bush]

verify

Comment 9

[Stephen P. Morse]

Reporter is still having a problem and Q/A (sairuh) is able to reproduce it.  
Here is the sequence of steps for reproducing it, although it works fine when I 
try it.

1. Start with a fresh profile
2. Go to http://prl.aps.org/
3. Click on either of the two GO buttons
4. An error message appears

I have tried this on both a linux box and a win32 box and it works fine for me.  
What am I doing different than both the reporter and q/a?  For one thing I'm 
running debug builds whereas they are running optimized builds.

Anyhow, reporter now agrees that this is not a cookie problem since no cookies 
are involved for the steps listed above.  Maybe a networking problem?  dbragg, 
you should probably decide what component it is and reassign as necessary.

Changing summary line from "Importing cookies from netscape" to "Unable to 
access Physical Review Letters website"

Comment 10

[dbragg]

Your right Steve.  As the steps you listed show, this isn't a migration bug. It 
looks like you're the best candidate for this bug (sorry).  If it's not a cookie 
issue, then I don't know what it is.  But it ain't a migration problem.

Changing component to cookies and engineer to [e-mail].

Comment 11

[Stephen P. Morse]

Well it ain't cookies so it's certainly not in my area.  I wouldn't mind fixing 
it if I could, but I can't fix it if I can't reproduce it.  I can't even get 
enough information to determine what area it's in.

So all I can do is reassign it to browser general and hope that the owner there 
can make a determination as to how to redirect this one.

It might help if the reporter can give some more details about the error message 
that he is getting.

Comment 12

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Stephan C. Buchert can you follow up with Physical Review Letters
 and see what kind of identification is actually used in their service?

Comment 13

[Stephen P. Morse]

I just received e-mail from the reporter containing the error message that he is 
getting.  Here it is:

Server Error

This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from
fulfilling your request. The most likely cause is a
misconfiguration. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in
the server's error log.

Comment 14

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Over to Evangelism, I suppose they're not letting us in because we're not
netscape or microsoft.

Comment 15

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

Assigning to self. Will write the email to them soon. Confirming

Comment 16

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

All Evangelism Bugs are now in the Product Tech Evangelism. See bug 86997 for
details.

Comment 17

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

taking

Comment 18

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

From a comment from Stephan, it appears that Phys Rev Letters now lets us in.
Stephan, please reopen this bug or send me email if you continue to have
problems with the site.


Aaahhhh, the good old days... Phys Rev D could always put me to sleep. ;-)

Comment 19

[Brant Gurganus]

Verified
2002030908/WinXP