Has the NWAM team looked at UPnP?
http://www.upnp.org/
And specific to this would be CR#6224486
Or to have a better idea of what the "competition" does,
plug in a Windows XP box to a LAN, snoop the traffic and
toggle the "automatic discovery" for the proxy setting.
You should see it broadcast looking for an http proxy.
So how does this relate to what we should do with Solaris?
*IF* you wanted to steer away from making something
Solaris specific, I'd argue that one approach would be
to adapt programs such as web browsers to send out a
request for the http proxy on the loopback interface and
for Solaris to provide a daemon that listens for and answers
those queries with information provided to it via some
"other means".
That "other means" could be broadcasting on the network
itself, to find the answer, or reading data from a config
file or using the GNOME interface.
Another approach might be to just have applications use
UPnP directly to the LAN, without having a middleware
daemon run on Solaris.
So some pros and cons with this approach:
pro - it implements an "industry standard" protocol;
con - it's not a simple solution;
pro - the work undertaken by Sun could be contributed
back to the open source community;
con - it requires changes to all programs that currently
use proxies;
pro - if a daemon is developed, we increase our position
as a worthwhile platform in the network appliance
space;
...and so on...
In addition, we could think about adding vendor specific
type codes to DHCP for proxies (I'm surprised that there
is nothing in DHCP for this - that I can find- yet) that
are retrieved at bootup and fed into the GNOME thing or
your login shell as $http_proxy, etc.
Darren
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