incompatible with proxy

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nirax
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Sep 15, 2008 9:05 pm

incompatible with proxy

Post by nirax » Thu Dec 25, 2008 5:41 am

Hi

I have posted this earlier too ... flagfox is incompatible with proxies. In my home we have a DSL broadband connection and no proxies and flagfox works perfectly well. In my office there is a LAN with proxy shielding it from outside network.Here Flagfox displays a error exclaimation mark in place of flag. I have used the same exact profile (by copying the entire mozilla directory) in home and office and the results are the same : home - yes, Office - no.

I have no control over the proxy configuration so neither can I change them nor check them to find out what is the problem. Since this is a problem likely to be present with many users I guess, it is worth the effort to modify flagfox for a workaroud.

Thanks
Niraj

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DaveG
Flagfox Developer
Posts: 723
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2007 9:06 pm
Location: Philadelphia, USA

Re: incompatible with proxy

Post by DaveG » Thu Dec 25, 2008 7:15 am

This is well known. Read this.

If you do not have local DNS access, Flagfox fundamentally cannot work. Without the ability to take a domain name and get its IP address, and thus look up the IP address in Flagfox's internal database of IP address locations, there is no way to find the location. If your proxy is doing DNS resolutions itself and thus you don't have access to the IPs, then there's nothing possible to do.

The only solution would be to ask an external server of some kind what the IP is on every page visit, which while possible, I do not like from a privacy standpoint. (this server would know everywhere you go) There's also the issue that the IPs your connection resolves to (via your proxy) might differ from whatever another server is connected to, thus giving different locations. (same thing happens with Geotool when not enacted via Flagfox; see the FAQ) Flagfox uses an internal database and it's going to stay that way.

You can still use Geotool by itself or with its OpenSearch plugin. Again, IPs will be resolved from Geotool's perspective, so they won't necessarily be the same server locations you personally are connecting to.

The proxy exists to shield you from the Internet and in this case it does. Not sure what your options are here. You could try setting up OpenDNS on your end. There are full SOCKS forwarding programs out there too, and I think there's a way to forward all system DNS with them, but again, I don't know whether that would work in your particular situation. If there was some magic way of doing an IP lookup to a proxy I would have used it by now, but there doesn't seem to be such a thing. (at least not via what I have to use in Firefox) The bottom line is I don't think it is currently possible. Sorry.

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