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
  <Directory "/var/www/html">
   ...    
   #                  
   # 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                                                                                                                                             
   ...                       
  </Directory>       
  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

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