mentor

[Anirudh Sanjeev]

Hi,

I'm not an expert, let alone a mentor here. You should get a second opinion
before taking this advice:

I don't think there can be a "truly" system wide proxy. While
gnome-network-properties sets the proxy, and sets it in gconf2 and the
environment variable, there's nothing that can be done to ensure that the
application that is using a network connection respects the http_proxy env
config.

In other words, any application developer has to manually add proxy
support. For example, ssh and git:// does not support http_proxy (or
didn't, last time I checked), and so you need to go through hoops to make
them work behind a network proxy.

The only work that can be done for a "truly system wide proxy" would be to
ensure all the shells - zsh, bash, etc recieve the appropriate http_proxy
and other env variables, and to emit these changes to all the shells, when
changes are made. The second portion will be more challenging.

To make matters worse, apt has a separate proxy configuration and many
other applications think it's a great idea to set their own individual
proxy server.

tl;dr - Unless you force all outgoing connections to tunnel through a proxy
emulating a direct connection, and do this during the intial stages of
application loading, there'll be no such thing as a "global http proxy".

Anirudh
-- 
Senior Undergraduate Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
http://anirudhsanjeev.org

Start something! http://consumelesscreatemore.com
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