Comments on: Help Needed: Auto-Configure Proxy Settings via DHCP

By: Janaka

Janaka — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:36:29 +0000

Hope this Link will be helpful…
http://theswarmintelligence.blogspot.com/2009/11/…

By: RoAkSoAx

RoAkSoAx — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:56:41 +0000

As other have said… the best solution is to configure a transparent proxy!! go for it! It’s really painful to use a non-transparent proxy if you have many machines

By: Alan Pope

Alan Pope — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:18:58 +0000

As others have suggested transparent proxying will help. I use ipcop which has a nice easy tickbox to set transparent proxying on. Job done.

By: Zeeta

Zeeta — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:16:19 +0000

I once setup my own dhcp server/http proxy this way:

1. dnsmasq to assign ip addresses and used as a nameserver
2. squid proxy
3. iptables to redirect http requests (port 80) to the squid proxy port (3128 by default)

therefore, no need to autodiscover a proxy.pac file.

By: Nathaniel McCallum

Nathaniel McCallum — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:30:38 +0000

Just thought I’d point out libproxy. We don’t currently support DHCP, but its on our roadmap. We’d love some help implementing it! http://code.google.com/p/libproxy/

By: Mark Drago

Mark Drago — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 13:18:15 +0000

You could also set the proxy up to be a transparent proxy. Squid supports this just fine, you just need to add a few firewall rules to send port 80 traffic through the proxy. This way the whole thing will work without any need for configuration on the client end.

By: Himuraken

Himuraken — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:11:21 +0000

Although this wouldn’t be the ideal setup in a business, my suggestion may work for a more static environment such as your home. Using DHCP, make your proxy box the default gateway for your LAN. I did this yesterday in a pinch on a ESX test server with IPCop and it worked fine. A better solution may just be to have your proxy replace your gateway device if it hasn’t already.

So if that works for you, then no need to worry about .pac and wpad’s.

–Himuraken

By: Matt Mossholder

Matt Mossholder — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:55:33 +0000

Here is how MS answered the problem. Supported by Firefox as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Proxy_Autodiscovery_Protocol

By: martin langhoff

martin langhoff — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:38:50 +0000

You need a PAC file, as Mark points out.

Now, if you have a bad DSL connection, I have some additional things you can try…

– Tridge’s old rproxy http://rproxy.samba.org/

– The new implementation: apache-crcsync (using apache as proxy, with an rsync-like delta protocol). This is in heavy development, but it works http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Apache_Proxy_CRCsync

By: Mark Waters

Mark Waters — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:42:13 +0000

I use dnsmasq for my dns and dhcp server and have this config option set :-
dhcp-option=252,http://proxy.collective-b.dyndns.org/proxy.pac

then on the wbserver I have the proxy.pac file containing details gleened from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy.pac

now each computer getting an automatic dhcp address also picks up a proxy.pac file and sets up the browser.

good luck
mark waters