[ILUG] anyone using TCD's annoying proxy setup?

Colm MacCarthaigh colm at stdlib.net
Mon Oct 11 22:51:51 IST 2004


On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 02:20:09PM -0700, gabriel gryffyn wrote:
> right, that works perfectly well in the web browsers, but i've no idea
> how to configure apt or other non-browser programs to work with it.

That's slightly more difficult. Presumably TCD use automatic
configuration so that they may arbitrarily change the details of their
proxy service, right now if I fetch that file I get:

  function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
  {
  return "PROXY proxy1.tcd.ie:8002; PROXY proxy4.tcd.ie:8002; DIRECT";
  }

but next week, it could be proxy2 and proxy3, or maybe even next minute
- it might be some form of load balancing, I really have no idea and
only used it for the first time today :)

So, you have two choices, you can hardcode the proxy details and if they
ever stop working - wget a new version of proxy.cgi's output and change
appropriately, or you can write some fancy init script that wget's on
startup or from /etc/network/interfaces to detect what network your on
and sets variables in /etc/profile accordingly.  

apt respects the http_proxy and ftp_proxy environment variables, just
use the "http://username:password@proxy:port" format :)

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net



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