Uniform Proxy Settings

Simon Andrews simon.andrews at bbsrc.ac.uk
Mon Oct 6 09:44:22 UTC 2008


Kulbir Saini wrote:
> 
> 
> Chuck Anderson wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 08:23:13PM +0530, Kulbir Saini wrote:
>>>> One suggestion to get around this would be to run a proxy on localhost
>>>   This sounds good but some work environments doesn't allow you to run
>>> proxy on your own machine.
>>
>> I don't see how it would matter.  The proxy would be an internal-only
>> abstraction of how the system talks to the rest of the net.  It
>> wouldn't be visible or usable from outside the local system.
> 
>   I think its not fair enough to introduce a proxy server (even if its 
> minimal and local) just because we can't figure out a uniform system to 
> set and retrieve the proxy settings. And even if we have this proxy 
> minimal and local proxy server, there is no guarantee that all the apps 
> will use it. So, IMHO its best to force applications to use a uniform 
> location like http_proxy for setting/getting the proxy settings.

I don't see the problem with this.  Although you might call this a proxy 
it would only be listening on localhost and wouldn't do any caching so I 
can't see what an IT department would object to.

Having thought about this some more I'd even be tempted to make this 
local proxy transparent so you need no support at all from any application.

In principle this is absolutely the right way to do things so that you 
don't have to enforce special behaviour in all applications.

Environment variables are not a great answer to this.  You can't 
externally change the environment of a running process so updates 
mid-session aren't possible.  Also even now I often find problems with 
things like sudo wiping out the proxy from the environment.

Simon.




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