FireFox proxy settings on managed clients

[Mhanson]

Hello, I am trying to find a way to propagate FireFox proxy settings from the server end on a 10.5 Server with roaming profiles.

FireFox ignores the settings specified in Prefrences/Network/Proxies, and I have not seen anything in my searches on the web that shows a way to force the settings.

I know that I can manually copy prefs.js into user directories, but that would take forever. Also, FireFox uses random names for it’s profiles, for example “sur39klx.default”. This makes mass copying from terminal difficult, if not impossible. At least as far as my knowledge goes.

I tried a cp command in terminal with wild cards for the username and the profile name (/Staff/*/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*.default/prefs.js and /Staff/*/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/*/prefs.js, but it did not like either. It seemed to be ok with one wild card for either the uername or the profile, but not two. Maybe I am missing something, but there must be a better way to go about this.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You in advance.

[Mhanson]

Does anyone know of any terminal commands that do find and replace?

[khiltd]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: Mhanson[/u][p]Does anyone know of any terminal commands that do find and replace? [/p][/QUOTE]

sed, awk, grep and probably several others I’m forgetting.

[Jtopoleski]

there is a plugin out there that forces Firefox to see the proxy settings, which I WAS using for a while, but al of a sudden it stopped working properly for me and I have not been able to get it to work since.

Really its the one thing that so completely annoys me with Firefox, the fact that they continue to ignore system settings for proxies at the same time of making it completely impossible to change the proxy via unix commands (at least from what I have been able to gather through research).

[jtoher]

The extension at http://www.curthread.org/download/systemproxy/systemproxy-0.5.xpi is installed in the user’s Profile, so it’s not as useful as a system wide machine preference. However, in the past I’ve found and modified those prefs.js files on the server using “find”:

cd location_of_home_dirs
find */Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -maxdepth 2 -name prefs.js

And assuming that comes up with the files you are looking for you could, for example:

find */Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -maxdepth 2 -name prefs.js -exec cp ./coolprefs.js {} \;

That line ends space, pair of braces, space, backslash, semicolon (the pair of braces stands in for the found file). Obviously this is an easier thing to do than to undo, so you might prefer to take smaller steps with a loop. You will first of all need to enter two lines, since “Application Support” has a space in it:

IFS=\ and hit return
return again

Changing your IFS variable as above (with no spaces) causes any “for” loop in this shell to use only line breaks between records, not spaces. Then you can do things like:

for i in `find */Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -maxdepth 2 -name prefs.js`; do
echo "something cautious involving ${i}"
echo "another little test here"
done

And note the double quotes around “$i” every time you use it, since “$i” has a space in it (from Application Support). Much the safest option would be to use Safari on your restricted network instead, and I think that is the way I will jump on this one. 😕

[Mhanson]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: jtoher[/u][p]The extension at http://www.curthread.org/download/systemproxy/systemproxy-0.5.xpi is installed in the user’s Profile, so it’s not as useful as a system wide machine preference. However, in the past I’ve found and modified those prefs.js files on the server using “find”:

And note the double quotes around “$i” every time you use it, since “$i” has a space in it (from Application Support). Much the safest option would be to use Safari on your restricted network instead, and I think that is the way I will jump on this one. 😕 [/p][/QUOTE]

I don’t know about just using Safari, and restricting people from using FireFox.

My reasoning being both ideological and technical. First off, there are some pages/web based apps that work better in one browser over the other. Second being ideological, open source software, software choice, user preference, and a whole slew of other less technical reasons.

Restricting browser choice because of Mozilla’s apparently glaring lack of attention in this area of FireFox seems a bit draconian to me.

There should be an option that someone could check in FireFox’s ProxyPrefs that has the browser follow the settings in Mac OS’s System Settings. Then we could work to propigate lock/op lock the setting.

Anyway, thank you everyone for suggestions so far.

[Dave Hagan]

This proxy issue is thankfully not just an issue for Mac users. Centrally managing Firefox on Windows is just as problematic. That said, one idea I had is to push out a profile you setup on your computer with the proxy information to your users via Terminal on your server. It would be nice if some of these software makers would adhere to the frameworks already put forth on the operating systems they’re building their applications for instead of going off and doing their own thing.

[Greg Neagle]

Maybe a little late for a reply (I’ve been on vacation!), but:

Firefox default settings

might get you started…

[Jtopoleski]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: jtoher[/u][p]The extension at http://www.curthread.org/download/systemproxy/systemproxy-0.5.xpi is installed in the user’s Profile, so it’s not as useful as a system wide machine preference. However, in the past I’ve found and modified those prefs.js files on the server using “find”:
[/QUOTE]

What you do is you make it a global extension. Mozilla’s site has the info on how to do this and then you deploy that version of the program. As a global extension it will go to everyones profile.

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