Features/Automatic Proxy Settings

Summary
Allow the user to setup transparent Proxy service.

Owner
Ariel Calzada

Current status

 * Targeted release: 0.98
 * Last updated: 2013-01-07
 * Percentage of completion: 80%

Detailed Description
Sugar deployments and users need to be able to set a proxy to access some network services.

In this entry you can learn a way of configuring automatic proxy server (PAC and WPAD) for testing purposes.

For testing a proxy in XO you can go to: Features/Proxy Settings

Benefit to Sugar
See Detailed Description.

Scope
It's not directly related to XO, it's just a part for building an environment for automatic proxy testing in XO

PAC - Proxy Auto Config
PAC method for proxy is very simple. You have to create a web-accessible file with special syntax in which you include proxy server data. This example works with Apache server. You can take a look to Bibliograpy for more info about PAC file configuration and installation in other webservers.

Steps:


 * Install httpd web server:

yum install httpd


 * Enable configuration override with htaccess

vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf  ...       #                      # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files. # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords: #  Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit #                     AllowOverride None ...                          Replace the line "AllowOverride None" with "AllowOverride All"


 * Create a web enabled directory proxy

mkdir /var/www/html/proxy


 * Create .htaccess file and the following content:

vim /var/www/html/proxy/.htaccess

AddType application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig .pac


 * Create PAC file and add the following content:

vim /var/www/html/proxy/proxy.pac

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { return "PROXY PROXY_SERVER_IP_OR_HOSTNAME:PORT"; }


 * Set permissions for the directory proxy

chown -R apache.apache /var/www/html/proxy chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/proxy


 * Restart httpd web server

service httpd restart


 * Test in your favorite browser





WPAD - Web Proxy Autodiscovery
Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol, or WPAD, is a technology which aids a web browser in automatically detecting the location of a PAC file using DNS or DHCP.

A browser that supports both DHCP and DNS will first attempt to locate a PAC file using DHCP, and should a DHCP configuration not exist fail-over to DNS WPAD will occur. If neither are configured, a browser will fail open. Source