[el_bastardo]

First of all, sorry for the weird title, I can't think of anything else. Second, my problem: I bring my MacBook Air to work every day, because I prefer working on my own computer. At work a proxy is set up that requires a username and password. Basically this is not a problem for surfing, but many applications try to access the internet without knowing this and some (like Dropbox, but I can't identify all that do this) for some reason give wrong user information. I guess they try to access the internet by any means. This usually leads to my proxy account being banned for some time every day. If I manually set all the applications I can think of to my proxy settings I don't have this problem but I manually have to set all of them back once I'm in a different network.

My question is, is it possible to have a proxy on 127.0.0.1 that serves as a proxy selector and a centralized line to the internet, so to speak, that I can set all my applications to and only have to select the proxy for this proxy itself?

This is the only solution I could come up with but I don't know how I can implement it.

Thanks for your help.

[ibook_steve]

I had the exact same problem, especially with iTunes, which would not take the proxy info from Network Preferences and would throw up dialog after dialog to authenticate with the proxy.

I got around this with Squidman:

SquidMan

Just create two locations in Network preferences: one that doesn't include the proxy (for working at home) and one that points to Squid (for work).

Steve

[el_bastardo]

Thanks, I'll check it out tomorrow. For now I can't quite figure out locations and I seem to have "forgotten" the network at work.

[ibook_steve]

Locations: different sets of network settings that you can quickly switch between in the Apple menu when you move from one location to another.

Steve

[el_bastardo]

OK, I got everything to kind of work. Firefox uses system proxy settings and connects over Squid, as does Dropbox, iTunes, etc. Nevertheless, new problems arise. For some reason the bandwith varies from bearably low to unbearably low. Loading a website can take anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. Downloading a song from iTunes takes for ever to start, then it starts at 10 hours remaining but in the end takes about 10 minutes. For now I've been able to live with this but there is one BIG problem: I can't access Google. This would be kind of acceptable if I would just use it as a search engine but I also use Gmail.

Again, thanks for the tip, it sounds great, but if I can't resolve these problems I don't think I can use it.

David

[el_bastardo]

OK, bandwith problem has resolved itself after posting and Google problem persists even when not using squid. Why can't this stuff ever be straight forward...

[el_bastardo]

For some unknown reason Google itself now works but not Gmail. It seems that the problem is https because I can't access my online banking either and a lot of other people have the same problem. From different forums I've learned that apparently Squid just can't handle https. Is this true? Because that seems like a major flaw as every webmail and banking service uses it.

David

[ibook_steve]

Are you pointing your https proxy to Squid in Advanced Network preferences? It's been a while since I used it, but I don't recall having a similar problem.

Steve

[el_bastardo]

Well that was easy. Thanks a lot Steve.

David