Setting up proxy.pac with apache2
Introduction
This guide will briefly take you through the process of setting up a automatic proxy configuration file hosted on debian server running apache2 so your client machines can configure themselves to use whatever proxies you might have.
Writing a proxy.pac
proxy.pac is the de-facto name for the proxy configuration file and is essentially a file containing the function definition for FindProxyForURL. This function is called by the browser when it attempts to connect to a URL in order to determine how it should do so.
At the very least the file must contain:
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
return "PROXY \<your.proxy.server>:\<port>";
}
Naturally you can do a lot more with this function, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Setting up apache2
Now that you have a proxy.pac, you need to put it somewhere where clients can access it, and it must have a mime-type of application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig otherwise it won't work. One way to do this is to create a .htaccess file in the same directory and place in it the following line:
AddType application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig .pac
In order for apache2 to read .htaccess you need the AllowOverride option in the proper \<directory>\</directory> directive to be All or sufficiently permissive, for example:
\<Directory />
Options +FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
\</Directory>
And we are done
Once all that is setup, just point your clients to http://where.proxy.pac.is.hosted/proxy.pac and tell them to use that for automatic proxy configuration. And viola!
Well it worked for me anyways...
Cheers,
Steve