Uniform Proxy Settings
Kulbir Saini
kulbirsaini at students.iiit.ac.in
Fri Oct 3 14:53:13 UTC 2008
Simon Andrews 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.
>
> 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.
This sounds good but some work environments doesn't allow you to run
proxy on your own machine. e.g. Consider an office env in a
multinational or a university where running proxy on every single
machine violates the computer usage policy.
> 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.
>
--
---------------------------------------------------
Thank you,
Kulbir Saini,
Computer Science and Engineering,
International Institute of Information Technology,
Hyderbad, India - 500032.
My Home-Page: http://saini.co.in/
My Web-Blog: http://fedora.co.in/
IRC nick : generalBordeaux
Channels : #fedora, #fedora-devel, #yum on freenode
--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
More information about the fedora-devel-list
mailing list