Kacheong Poon wrote:
Darren Reed wrote:
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.
I will check it out. Thanks.
Firefox has something in this area too called WPAD which appears to be
an eariler (possibly defunct) method than the upnp stuff.
I found this by turning on "Automatic Proxy Config" in Firefox 2.x and
then snooping as it started up and went to a web page I knew I needed a
proxy for.
The snoop showed me that firefox was causing traffic for a host called
"wpad".
So a little googling later I found what WPAD is:
http://open.itworld.com/5037/book_050425firefoxhacks/page_1.html
and an expired IETF draft:
http://www.wrec.org/Drafts/draft-cooper-webi-wpad-00.txt
Hey and that draft even has a 'Sun Microsystems' employee listed as
co-author!
So this requires changing the apps, right? The obvious
problem is that we cannot change every apps. I suspect
that it may not even be possible to change the bundled
Firefox as this will cause the Sun code base to diverge
from the core one.
Maybe not since Firefox supports WPAD already.
BTW, what does Firefox do when the proxy setting is set
to Auto-detect? Does it do the above?
It does WPAD.
So this suggestion is about having a "default" environment
variable set for all processes after bootup. But how about
changing it after bootup? How about apps which do not
use this method to obtain proxy info?
Even if we think of boot time being special how will the NWAM daemon set
the default environment variable for processes that start after it.
BTW NWAM should not be thinking in terms of boot time vs anything else
at all it is all linkup/linkdown and service startup based. Boot time
is not special.
--
Darren J Moffat
_______________________________________________
networking-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
