Hi Squid users, Mark Reynolds covers use of WPAD in Section 5 of the FAQ and asks for any comments to be posted back to the group. I started with Mark's instructions, and found I had to do some extra work, so for anybody who is interested, here are my comments:
First some notes about our environment: clients on win9x and win2k, squid2.5Stable3(+WCCP) proxy servers, IIS5 internal web servers, Bind 9 DNS running under NT4. Until now, I only transparently proxied using WCCP because I couldn't get WPAD or autoproxy scripts to work reliably within the initial time constraints of our IE5 rollout (500+ PCs), although all builds went out with the "automatically detect settings" checkbox ticked, ready for a time when it could be used. My main problem has been with broken Netscape autoproxy functions on some Win2K workstations, in particular MyIPAddress() which for us is essential to allocating clients from different subnets to different squid proxies. Microsoft haven't supplied a fix for this (q816941 among others implicate winhttp.dll and .NET) that worked for us, so I wrote an ASP script to get the client IP address from server variables and spit out a basic proxy.pac file with just the PROXY line. (CGI delivery is permitted by the Netscape standard). Having stored this asp script on my internal IIS5 server as wpad.dat, I then set up an application extension mapping .dat files to the same process as .asp files. The other problem (WPAD not working) was resolved by testing with Ethereal against an IE6 client. This showed that the wpad.dat GET request puts the IP address into the header and not the wpad hostname as I had expected, so once I had set up a new host header for the default site with the IP address as the host name, it all works as expected. Thankyou to all who have provided so much help on this newsgroup Phil DG Confidentiality Notice This communication and the information it contains: (a) is intended for the person(s) or Organisation(s) named above and for no other persons or organisations and, (b) may be confidential, legally privileged and protected by law. Unauthorised use, copying or disclosure of any of it may be unlawful. When addressed to our clients any opinions or advice contained in this e-mail are subject to CCRE's terms and conditions of business notified to the client or expressed in the governing client engagement letter. If you receive this communication in error, please notify us immediately, destroy any copies and delete it from your computer system.
