Open Bug 646218 Opened 13 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Wpad discovery not performed on network change (proxy)

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

4.0 Branch
x86
macOS
defect

Tracking

()

UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: dmcdonnell, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

At home (no WPAD) direct access configured correctly. When roaming my laptop back to work, WPAD discovery is not reperformed (like in Firefox 3.x) so it does not discover my work proxy server.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Access network (network has no WPAD configured)
2. Sleep laptop/disconnect from network
3. Access new network (network has WPAD configured)
Actual Results:  
No external HTTP access because of corporate proxy

Expected Results:  
Should reperform auto-discovery
Version: unspecified → 4.0 Branch
The other way to solve this problem is for the WPAD script to default to no proxy when the source IP address doesn't match your corporate addressing. That's what we do and it may be something that's expected. So Mozilla may not be in a rush to support this one.
Using client IP address within a WPAD script is unreliable. My WPAD script services thousands of users (with systems we dont maintain). We had multiple issues by checking the client IP address of the system and using no-proxy when doesnt match:
Sorry, incomplete post above.

Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 clients (ie any current OS) - some browsers report IPv6 address which breaks script

Multi-homed PCs (ie multiple network interfaces):
 - Users running VMWare (private adapters)
 - Some webcams install IP interfaces (broadcast over IP?)

All these scenarios break a WPAD script that uses client IP.

One other side effect of Firefox not refreshing WPAD on network change is if you move between two networks that both require WPAD, then this will be broken even for scripts that check client IP address.

NB this did work in previous versions of firefox (on Mac, unsure of Windows/Linux).
If they made Firefox use the system settings properly for WPAD then they could be passing the buck to Apple if it doesn't work. Maybe it's Apple that's made it difficult for Firefox to get this right.
Dave do you still see this problem?
Flags: needinfo?(dmcdonnell)
Summary: Wpad discovery not performed on network change → Wpad discovery not performed on network change (proxy)
My work has moved away from using HTTP proxies for internet access so I'm not able to easily test the behaviour anymore.
Flags: needinfo?(dmcdonnell)
Severity: normal → S3
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