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Re: configure web proxy via DHCP server



On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 11:18:25PM +0000, Brian May wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 09:56:38AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On the client side, however, at least dhcp3-client requires recompiling
> > for each option you want to export to the client hook scripts.  This was

> You do? I was kindof hoping that with /etc/dhcp3/dhclient*-hooks.d/,
> it would be just a matter of adding an extra script that runs...

Ah, I'm sorry, I misremembered -- the actual problem is not the lack of
option exporting, it's that recent dhcp clients and servers will
negotiate with one another to decide what options will actually be sent
(presumably to reduce the payload size); so unless the dhcp3-client is
configured to explicitly request such options, they won't be sent by the
server.  So strictly speaking, this doesn't have to be done with a
recompile, but it does require the intervention of the dhcp3 maintainers
if you want this support by default (i.e., without an admin having to
edit dhclient.conf).

> > recently done for the netbios options that Samba uses.  I know there are
> > many more unexported options that are potentially useful to other
> > packages, including ntp timeserver information; it might be nice to
> > gather a list of them all at once for submission to the dhcp3
> > maintainers, so they're not constantly recompiling to special-case each
> > attribute.

> Sounds like a good idea...

> So we can put the proxy server on the DHCP server, in the form
> of a reference to a PAC file.

> We can (with modifications) retrieve the reference to the PAC
> file on the client.

> Then what?

> I think that there are two cases:

> 1. browsers that don't support PAC files, eg. lynx, links, and
> w3m probably don't (correct me if I am wrong).

> 2. browsers that do support PAC files, but need to be configured
> to use it for each user on the system.

For 1. above, I imagine most (if not all) browsers that don't support
javascript /do/ support global config files.  At minimum, therefore,
each such browser package could add its own hook script to
/etc/dhcp3/dhclient-enter-hooks.d/ that would update the config file on
disk.  This still leaves the question of how to refresh the
configuration of any running browsers, but that's probably a question to
be sorted out individually with the respective upstream developers
rather than here.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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