RE: [squid-users] Can't download settings from proxy? Not necessarily a Squid issue, but maybe someone can help.

Hi Group,

Well, I believe I have discovered the issue. Leave it to Microsoft to
screw things up. (I love how they specifically noted Squid in the KB
article I will link to below.)

Apparently they got this great idea (and it actually isn't a bad idea)
to go ahead and implement something called the Automatic Proxy Result
Cache. In a nutshell, it had cached an old version of the proxy
configuration information, and therefore wasn't updating it. See this
link for more on it:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;271361

Well, rather than play around with the registry, I believe I may have
found a somewhat simpler solution. Basically all you have to do is in
Internet Options, uncheck the Automatically Detect Settings box, close
IE (if that's how you got to the Internet Options box), then re-open it.
Go back in, check the Automatically Detect Settings box, close it, then
re-open it. It should have then downloaded the new wpad.dat file. I
used Ethereal to confirm that it did indeed work.

Now, since I was testing this on an XP box, I logged out and tried it
with my user name. Same problem as I originally had. Did the above,
and it worked beautifully.

According to the KB article, Microsoft implemented this in IE 5.5. That
explains too why I had no problems with the Windows 98 box I was playing
with as well, since it had reverted back to IE 5.

It was definitealy a strange (yet interesting) problem. Took me a while
to figure it out, and a lot of head banging on the keyboard, wall, door,
etc.

Hope that helps anyone else who may run into this problem!

Cheers!
Scott

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Wrosch
> Sent: Friday, March 28, 2003 9:14 AM
> To: squid-users@squid-cache.org
> Subject: [squid-users] Can't download settings from proxy? Not
necessarily
> a Squid issue, but maybe someone can help.
>
> Hello everyone!
>
> I've got a problem that maybe one of you can help me out with. I've
> done some searching for it, but haven't been able to come up with
> anything yet.
>
> Anyways, here's the problem. I've implemented WPAD, and thought
> everything was working fine in my trials. Everything was
> auto-configuring properly, and everything was golden.
>
> Then I got it in my head to go test an XP box yesterday. That's where
> the issue hit. Initially when I was pinging
> wpad.marketingassociates.com, it was pinging to the old IP address
(the
> proxy server just changed IP addresses). So I flushed the DNS list in
> XP by doing a ipconfig /dnsflush (or something close to that). Fixed
> the pinging problem. But, it's still not downloading the wpad.dat
file
> from wpad.marketingassociates.com ...
>
> So, I whip out and install Ethereal, and watch what it's doing when
it's
> trying to auto-detect the settings. What do I see? It's still
calling
> out for the old IP address, even though when I do a ping it's pings
the
> correct address.
>
> It doesn't appear either that it's just this one XP box. It looks
like
> multiple boxes are having the same issue. The only common denominator
> that I can figure is that they're all running Internet Explorer 6. I
> uninstalled it on one Windows 98 box earlier, and the problem went
away.
> Reinstalled IE 6, no problems. (Ended up uninstalling it again for a
> different issue with that box.)
>
> So, does anyone have any ideas at all? Again, I have been searching
for
> solutions, but haven't been able to come up with anything. I can't
> uninstall IE 6 on all of the boxes because IE6 is installed when the
OS
> is installed on a couple of them. Plus, it takes way too much time
out
> of my already busy schedule.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Scott
Received on Fri Mar 28 2003 - 11:05:26 MST