Uniform Proxy Settings

[Simon Andrews]

Kulbir Saini wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
>    Whenever I try a new version of Fedora, the first problem I face is 
> setting the proxy. It seems for almost every application, I have to 
> specify proxy at a different place. We have this "System -> Preferences 
> -> Internet and Network -> Network Proxy" app to specify proxy settings. 
> But I wonder if there is some application which obeys these settings.

This has come up before and it's a messy subject.  I can throw into the 
debate the problem of NetworkManager and proxies - since I have to use a 
proxy at work, but not at home, and unsetting all the various places you 
can put a proxy is a royal pain.

The big problems are:

1) There is no common place to set a proxy variable.  Some programs (eg 
wget) look for the http_proxy environment variable.  Many Gnome programs 
look for the gconf setting, some programs (firefox) have their own 
internal setting.

2) Many programs won't update proxy settings on the fly so there's no 
way to transparently change a proxy without closing down and reopening 
the program.

One suggestion to get around this would be to run a proxy on localhost 
and make all proxy aware applications use that in their default install. 
  This wouldn't actually have to do any caching - just act as a common 
point at which behaviour could actually be changed without the 
cooperation of the programs.

We could then put hooks into NetworkManager to change the behaviour of 
the local proxy so that it either sends its requests directly to the 
internet, or routes them via a secondary proxy.

This all feels a bit icky to me - but I can't think of a nicer way of 
doing this which doesn't require the cooperation of the authors of every 
proxy-aware application.

Simon.