usability: setting system-wide network proxies for all applications

Andrew Ziem andrewz at springsrescuemission.org
Wed Aug 16 17:57:48 UTC 2006


Here's something I filed in Bugzilla back in June.  Fixing this issue 
would make life easier for enterprise users, but it's not clear what 
exactly the solution would be.  Should the proxy control be integrated 
into system-config-network, Sabayon, or somewhere else?

---https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=197371----------------------------------------
Description of problem:
Imagine the scenario of a multi-computer office network, and each 
computer has multiple users.  The office firewall does not allow direct 
port 80 access, so all web traffic must go through the web proxy.

Setting the proxy for each application for each user on each computer 
can be tiring. 

Competition:
In SUSE 10.1, Yast can configure a system wide proxy which affects (at 
least) Firefox, Gnome, KDE, and environment variables.  Programs such as 
wget, links, and yum (on Fedora) obey the environment variables. In SUSE 
10.1, OpenOffice.org's proxy setting is not affected (but it would be 
nice if it were).

In Microsoft Windows, most applications obey the system proxy settings 
(Control Panel->Internet Options->Connections).
---https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=197371----------------------------------------


Recently, I thought about two other nuances.  First, when yum runs as a 
service, (by default) it doesn't load environment variables from 
/etc/profile.d/*sh, which is a convenient place to setup proxy 
environment variables.  Second, non-GUI Linux programs (unlike GUI web 
browsers, for example) support neither proxy auto-detection nor 
automatic configuration URLs. 




Andrew




More information about the Fedora-desktop-list mailing list