Proxy Auto-Discovery

Question

Level 1

0 points

Proxy Auto-Discovery

I am in need of having student laptops over the wireless automatically pointed towards a proxy. One option I know is a transparent proxy, but we'd like to be able to let certain users opt out by changing the settings if possible. I found this option in the bootpd manual page:

dhcp proxy_auto_discoveryurl

I added it to my bootpd server by using NetInfo Manager:

dhcp proxy_auto_discoveryurl -> http://192.168.1.99/test.pac

At first I didn't think it was working, but I booted my MacBook Pro into my windows partition and sure enough it all seemed to work. Both IE and Firefox auto-detected the .pac file and started directing their traffic there. I boot into Mac OS X again and it's still not working.

Has anyone had any success with this option to deploy proxy settings? Is there an easier way that doesn't require me manually pointing 200 workstations to a .pac file on the internet? Is this simply a feature that doesn't work in Mac OS X 10.4?

--
Shane

MacBook Pro (Core2Duo), Mac OS X Server 10.4.8, Mac OS X Client 10.4.10, Windows XP Pro SP2

Posted on Oct 1, 2007 5:07 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

58,311 points

Oct 1, 2007 11:29 PM in response to Shane Dixon

You may need to configure the clients to use an auto-discovered PAC file.

If you look in System Preferences -> Network -> (interface) -> Proxies you can tell the OS to either use a PAC or use manual settings. It's likely that if you're set to Manual (the default) it ignores the DHCP PAC setting (although that's only a theory).

You may be able to automate this using networksetup, if it's installed on your systems (part of ARD). If it is you can:

<pre class=command>sudo networksetup -setautoproxystate "Built-in Ethernet" on</pre>

Reply

Answer 2

Shane Dixon Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 2, 2007 9:03 AM in response to Camelot

I tried setting this in the preferences and I set it to auto-configure using a .pac file and then I left the field blank where I'm supposed to specify the URL. I'll test this on Thursday to see if it works. As for the networksetup, I ran this on my machine and found that the -setautoproxystate doesn't exist. I see options to set the proxy for ftp, web, secure web, streaming, gopher, socks, firewall, and the bypassdomain option, but n -setautoproxystate...

Reply