Calling All Admins!

[LordThing]

Here's the deal. We have a corporate firewall/proxy. We also have a significant number of internal servers that provide a large number of apps. Many of our sites are on very slow fram connections and we need to set up IE to bypass the proxy for local servers. Not an issue. There is a section inside of IE to do this.

As time goes on, we add more and more names/ip's to the bypass list. We have run into some small issues with the size of our list. IE 5.0 or 5.5 non-sp1 can only have a max of 250 characters. No biggie, we upgrade them to IE 6 and it's fine. Now I am installing IBM Access Connections on our laptops(it provides dynamic switching between ip sets and wired/wireless access with no user intervention). One of the things it controls is the proxy settings. It only allows a 200 character limit. Our list is at least 2 to 3 times larger than that.

I know I can not use the app, I can deal with that. Just would make it harder for our users. And, yes, I can bitch at IBM and see if they can increase the buffer. I honestly want to know if there is a better way to do this? Maintaining this proxy list is a bear sometimes. One of the reasons it's so large is that we decided to add every variation and possible server name we planned on using in the future.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[mobly99]

I'd try a proxy.pac file rather than maintaining that list on all the PCs.

You'll have to create your proxy.pac file, throw it on a web server (you may have to set a mime type for it) and then set all the clients to use that for the "automatic configuration script"

here is a sample - really basic proxy.pac file that we used on some machines to kill all internet access except for internal access.
--Dave

function
FindProxyForURL(url, host)

{
if (localHostOrDomainIs(host, "localhost") ||
dnsDomainIs(host, "127.0.0.1"))
return "DIRECT";

else if (isPlainHostName(host)||
dnsDomainIs(host, ".ourdomain.com")||
isInNet(host, "10.0.0.0", "255.0.0.0")||
isInNet(host, "169.254.0.0", "255.255.0.0")||
isInNet(host, "172.16.0.0", "255.240.0.0")||
isInNet(host, "192.0.2.0", "255.255.255.0")||
isInNet(host, "192.168.0.0", "255.255.0.0")

return "DIRECT";


else
return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:9999";
}

 

[Garion]

Yep, a PAC file is definitely the way to go. I maintain the one for my company, and it's about 30 pages long. It's got a lot of statements, but it's pretty basic. I'll try to grab some examples of how you might do it and post it here.

Do you have a webserver that you can use to host a PAC file at your company?

- G

 

[LordThing]

We have a few apache servers and a couple Notes servers that also double as web servers. So, you make up this .pac file and do what....point IE to it?