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Link checker configuration

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Discover settings required if web page URLs are regularly checked in OLIB.

Access OLIB defaults and edit settings

 Note: These are settings that affect the operation of OLIB as a whole and are only accessible to System Managers.

  1. In the Menu go to System Administration> OLIB Defaults.
  2. Click the Defaults record to display the details.
  3. Click modify record to make changes.

Available Link checker configuration

Field Description

The Link Checker feature is used in Daystart to check that the urls linked as attached objects in OLIB are still valid. The link checking process is included in Daystart and can be configured to send you an alert if any links fail the check.

You may require help from local technical support to supply the proxy details required in this screen.

The Daystart program normally runs overnight. The results are shown here on the OLIB Defaults Link Checker Configuration layout.

The results for individual objects are also shown on the Objects layout using the fields below.
Run Link Checker? A Yes/No flag that specifies whether the link checker process is run at all in daystart. It is set to a null value by default, and daystart treats this as No. To start running the link checker process in daystart, change this flag to Yes.
Control URL If left blank this defaults to http://www.oclc.org. This is a test url that daystart uses to confirm that internet access is ok. If you prefer to use another url than the one provided, ensure that this is a reliable address that is always accessible, otherwise daystart will assume an internet access problem and not proceed any further with link checking.
Politeness Pause The number of seconds that the Link Checker process must pause between accesses to the same web site – this prevents the web site from denying further checks in order to prevent a denial of service attack.
Certificate Store The URL of the certification store that is required to access any target web site which uses or diverts automatically to an https address. This will include ebook sites that divert to an https page to ask for a login.
Proxy Server The name of the proxy server that the link checker has to go through to get to external URLs.
Proxy Username The username required to authenticate on the proxy server.
Proxy Password   The password required to authenticate on the proxy server.
Default Failure Notice Select your preferred link checker notice from the drop down. Notices are configurable in Alerting> Notices.
Email Size Limit Enter a positive whole number to indicate the upper size limit of the link checker alert email. Any link checker alerts that are larger than this will be divided into separate emails, subject to the limits in the following two fields. If not set the default is 20. (20 KB is equivalent to approximately 10 pages of printed text).
No. Emails Per Notice  Enter a positive whole number to indicate the maximum number of emails to send per link checker alert notice. This is used in conjunction with the Email Size Limit field to determine the size and number of emails that are generated per link checker alert notice during a single run of the link checker in daystart. For example, if you enter 2 in the Email Size Limit field and 4 in the No. Emails Per Notice field, and the link checker generates an email that would contain 35,000 characters, the link checker will only send 4 emails each containing a maximum of 2,000 characters. The remaining 27,000 characters will not be sent by email. However, you would still be able to see which URLs failed – they would be listed in the Details for the Selected Log field for the relevant log. If not set the default is 2.
Fail Limit The maximum number of URLs that fail the link check before the link checker terminates itself in a controlled manner. This provides a failsafe mechanism if there is a fundamental problem that means that every URL fails the link check. Without this limit and in this scenario, the link checker would attempt to check every URL in your database and report a failure for each one. The default if not set is 50.