Uniform Proxy Settings

[Horst H. von Brand]

Simon Andrews <simon.andrews at bbsrc.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Nodz!

> 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.

Icky.

> 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.

This is papering over the (very real) bugs in the applications (Yes, I do
consider not getting and resetting proxy and other network settings
transparently a bug), at a very real cost for all users.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
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