bobpeers -> blog

One thing that puzzles me is why Linux (specifically Fedora) doesn’t have native support for NTLM proxy servers. The Gnome proxy settings do allow for authenticated proxies but if you are stuck behind a Microsoft ISA server then you are out of luck.

Actually this isn’t quite correct as you can download ntlmaps and then set your proxy setting to point to this which then authenticates your connections.

But I don’t understand why this can’t be included as standard. It occurred to me that there could be licensing issues but Firefox does have native support and that’s open source (even though the license is different, Mozilla Public License vs GPL V2).

After I wrote previously about toggling the proxy setting in Internet Explorer I looked for a similar function for Firefox.

There’s quite a few proxy extensions available, but if you just want to toggle the proxy on and off quickly I recommend QuickProxy.

If you use a laptop both at home and at work it gets really annoying having to switch between using and not using a proxy server to connect to the internet.

Having found quite a few sites explaining how to get the ProxyEnable registry value it’s pretty trivial to make a VBScript that toggles the flag on and off. Just save this script in a file with a .vbs extension and double click to run. Each time it runs it will just toggle the proxy on and off .

I could write the usual warning about modifying the registry but we’re all adults here….

Const HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001
strComputer = "."
Set objRegistry = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\default:StdRegProv")
strKeyPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings"
strValueName = "ProxyEnable"
objRegistry.GetDWORDValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
if dwValue=0 then
	dwValue=1
else
	dwValue=0
end if
objRegistry.SetDWORDValue HKEY_CURRENT_USER, strKeyPath, strValueName, dwValue
if dwValue=1 then
	msg="Proxy Enabled"
else
	msg="Proxy Disabled"
end if
msgbox msg,64,"Proxy Toggle"

I previously mentioned how I couldn’t get Mepis to update through a proxy server with authentication.

Well I tried this suggestion which works fine for both apt-get and synaptic package manager. Just add this entry to your /etc/apt/apt.conf file:

ACQUIRE {
http::proxy "http://DOMAIN\username:password@IP:port/"
}

There are times when the sheer wealth of Linux distros and the associated differences between each actually leaves me wanting a bit more standardization between them.

A case in point is that since trying out many distos in a virtualized environment behind a proxy server that requires authorization it seems there is no standard way of specifying proxy servers.

On top of that it seems there is no global setting that reliably affects the entire system. On an average system there are many applications requiring internet access, curl, wget ,web browser, email program, software updater to name just a few.

Getting Firefox to access a proxy server is pretty easy but it requires me to individually set the server from within the Firefox preferences. My experiences so far show a few different possiblilites

1. A popular one that should work globally is to set environment variables, something like this

   export http_proxy="http://username:password@server.com:port/" 

   This works for some people but it only takes a search on Google to find many people for whom this has no effect.

2. From KDE there is a proxy option in the system settings, you can either use the environment setting from above or manually enter them. I’ve tried both these with Mepis and then used the Package Updater only to find these setting seem to be totally ignored (I get a 407 proxy error)

3. If you use YUM as a package updater you can edit /etc/yum.conf and add these lines:

   # The proxy server - proxy server:port number
   proxy=http://server.com:port/
   # The account details for yum connections
   proxy_username=username
   proxy_password=password
   

   I used this on CentOS 5 and to my amazement it actually worked.

4. A few times I would get the error about ‘nonnumerical port 8080?’ this turn out to be that the last ‘/’ at the end of the url is very important!
5. Then there’s similar advice for adding http_proxy=………… to the /etc/wgetrc file, plus others for curl and many other programs.

My point here is that I just want a simple GUI to add my proxy servers and then by default all my applications requiring network access should honour these setting unless I have explicitly told the application to use it’s own settings.