All,
We've got a copy of this book of abstracts for presentations at a
chemical engineering conference in 2005:
http://odin-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/und:und_all:ODIN_ALEPH006134188
It's got a CD-ROM included with the full papers for hundreds of them,
and now we have a patron who wants to consult one of them.
Unfortunately, we can't get the dang thing to work. The files on the
disc are encrypted. There's a utility which is supposed to decrypt
them, but it doesn't work. When you run the program, it starts a web
browser and takes to localhost:103.[1] After that, it times out and
reports that it's unable to connect. Yes, I disabled the Windows
firewall completely and tried it in multiple browsers.
There are several little executable files on the CD, all of which appear
to do the exact same thing -- open a failed connection to localhost:103.
Executing them from the command line yielded no useful information, even
using command-line switches like -h, --help, /?, and /h. None of them
had any help text, though a few produced badly written HTML output
claiming they couldn't access things, or that they were corrupted. I
take that as an indication that my wild-ass guessing at their purposes
and usage were wrong, rather than actual file corruption.
I've sent an email to the company that made it (they're still around!)
but thought I'd ask here also. Any insights?
Will Martin
Web Services Librarian
University of North Dakota
[1] Firefox blocks port 103 by default. To get by that you have to
manually enable port 103 by putting
user_pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "103"); in your
profile's user.js.
