Setting up Web Proxy (HTTP) in Terminal

You need to find out why Network Preferences is crashing first. You are probably going to continue to have problems until you get that fixed. Try moving your Network Preferences plist file to a new location, reboot, then re-open the network preferences panel to re-create the preferences file.

Never mind - I saw your other message. Still, it might be a good idea to reboot after deleting the plist file. You didn't say you tried that.

Also, look in /var/log/System.log to see if there is any information about why the crash happened.

Message was edited by: etresoft

I agree with etre, that you should try to fix the problem with System Preferences, but if that fails you can use the command line tool networksetup to configure the proxy.

For example:

sudo networksetup -setwebproxy "Built-in Ethernet" your.proxy.net 8080

running networksetup on its own will give you a list of the other network-centric things you can change via this command.

But if you Network Preferences are screwed up, there is a strong possibility that other network operations will be screwed up.

Then, you will be back here with some really strange routing or netmask problem and nobody will be able to help.

Setting up a proxy with username and password, while not an advanced task, is not routine either. It is not something you should be trying while you know, for a fact, that critical parts of your OS are broken.

IIRC networksetup doesn't exist in 10.3. It was added sometime in 10.4