Thanks for all the responses so far. Let me try to
summarize the issues and suggestions. Please correct
me if I miss something.
For those not familiar with NWAM, a one line summary
of NWAM related to this network proxy issue is that NWAM
tries to let a sys admin specify a network proxy configuration
based on the network environment automatically. For
example, a sys admin can specify that when a laptop is
connected at home, there is no proxy required. But when
the laptop is connected to an internal corporate network X,
proxy configuration Y should be used. NWAM will detect this
kind of network environment changes and set the network
proxy configuration accordingly.
Different apps use different methods to get the network proxy
information. The following is a list of methods mentioned
so far.
1. Get the proxy info from some environment variables.
2. Allow a user to specify manually the proxy info.
3. For GNOME apps, they can use the existing method via
the GConf keys.
4. For WPAD aware apps, they can use this protocol to
retrieve the info.
5. For Bonjour/Avahi aware apps, they can use this protocol
to retrieve the info.
The question we have is how to achieve the stated NWAM goal
with the above constraints. For 1 and 2, it seems that NWAM
can do nothing about it. It is not possible to change the
environment variables of a running process.
For 3, NWAM can change the host GConf setting based on the
network environment. But this only works for GNOME apps.
For 4, NWAM can probably do the following. NWAM can perform
WPAD and check if there is proxy info available from any
server (we need to figure out what to do if there are multiple
servers providing different info). If the info is available,
then NWAM may do nothing. A WPAD aware app will find the
proper info from the server(s). But if there is no proxy
info available from the server(s) and there is a NWAM proxy
setting associated with the current network environment, NWAM
may "fake" a DHCP server (*) reply using that info to any query
done by WPAD aware apps. The WPAD aware app will take this
info. If there is proxy info available from the server(s) and
there is also a NWAM proxy setting, NWAM can still "fake" a
DHCP server reply if the setting is supposed to override the
proxy info from the server(s).
For 5, NWAM can also do the Bonjour/Avahi discovery and use
a similar method as described above.
Comments and suggestions?
(*) DHCP is the first discovery method used by WPAD.
--
K. Poon.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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