Bug in IE 5.5 WPAD mechanism? - was Re: IE 5.5 doesn't work?

Interesting. So maybe we've just been lucky that 5.0 has been working!

FYI I also found a workaround for the 5.5 problem. In all of the past cases
people have been able to check the "Use a proxy server" box and put
in the appropriate address and away they go. For us, the upgrade to
5.5 made this not work. However, if you check the Advanced button,
and then enter the proxy info into the HTTP choice, it works.

??

Time to rewrite all the documentation!

david.

>>> Bob Franklin <r.c.franklin@reading.ac.uk> 07/20/00 10:36AM >>>
On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, David Minor wrote:

> What I see is that when the browser starts up it says "Detecting Proxy
> Settings" for a long time, and then starts up OK. However, when you
> hit a URL that is supposed to prompt you for username and password,
> it doesn't. Usually when I have seen this behavior it's because the
> browser hasn't grabbed the cache.pac file correctly, so it doesn't know
> that it's supposed to do something at the appropriate times.

We've been seeing this with certain version of IE 5 too (not just
5.5). It seems to be a problem with the 'Automatically Detect Proxy
settings' option not working - however, I'm not sure why.

When I look at an effected machine here (usually W2K) - it does the DNS
lookup for wpad.<domain> and fetches the WPAD file correctly. However, it
then doesn't seem to use it - looking at the Squid logs, the browser never
asks Squid for the page, so I don't think it's a Squid issue.

You can solve it [at least in my experience] each time by doing Options ->
Connection -> LAN Settings -> OK -> OK - then it works.

The only correlation I've found so far is that the machines affected seem
to be those which have had Microsoft patch Q262509 applied (see
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q262/5/09.ASP - the bit
about WPAD spoofing). This article says something about fixing a problem
with the 'third level domain' which we are (rdg.ac.uk).

I've tried fiddling around with the ways responses are returned, etc. but
it doesn't appear to work.

The problem [as always with MS problems] - is what avenues do we have to
explore this further - what exactly does this patch do (so can we
eliminate it)?

  - Bob

-- 
 Bob Franklin <r.c.franklin@reading.ac.uk>     Tel. +44 (0)118 931 8432
 Systems and Communications, IT Services, The University of Reading, UK