[Sugar-devel] [FEATURES][DESIGN] Network proxy configuration

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 25 January 2012 04:33, Jerry Vonau <jvonau at shaw.ca> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-01-24 at 13:02 +0100, Simon Schampijer wrote:
>> Hi Sridhar and Jarry,
>>
>> can you give a bit of inside on the usage of that Feature in the field?
>> So far I am clear that you did use the gnome-network section to set the
>> proxy. To make it easier the option should now be as well available in
>> the CP in Sugar.
>>
>
> Yes, both tools can set the same gconf settings.
>
>> - who does set the proxy for each XO, the learner or an administrator?
>>
> That depends on the exact school deployment. I can see both occurring,
> ("OK class open my settings then click on proxy, enter these
> settings...."), pre-populate the gconf settings at image creation
> time(we can create an image for a large user base), or alter these
> settings via a customization key routine that we have developed.
>
>> - what is the scope of the proxy? does each school has another one, is
>> it per district, deployment...

Each state in Australia has its own schools system, and hence its own networks.


>> - what type of proxy do you set, per url or manually?
>>
>
> Here again, depends on the school location. All this is really
> meaningless unless the proxy info is exported as an environment variable
> for sugar-update-control and populate yum.conf to allow these to work
> through the proxy. That's in a different patch to sugar-session. Anish
> where is the patch for sugar-session?

Most states have an automatic proxy configuration file (PAC/WPAD),
which prompts the user for their own username and password. How they
expect four-year-olds to work this out is beyond me :S

The problem with PAC/WPAD scripts is that they are written in
JavaScript, meaning that only Browse and Firefox can interpret them.
We've patched things so that a user can set both a manual proxy and an
automatic one [1]. The manual proxy gets written to the http_proxy env
variable so that other activities can get online. Browse continues to
use the automatic configuration script.

I'm curious about what possibilities we'll have once WebKit is
integrated into Sugar. Can it mean that we can do away with http_proxy
and just have all activities use the automatic configuration script to
traverse the proxies?


[1] https://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/660



Sridhar Dhanapalan
Engineering Manager
One Laptop per Child Australia