Uniform Proxy Settings

[Kulbir Saini]

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

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