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Proxy auth bugs, round three

David — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:13:34 +0000

Another odd bug, this time in the RSS feed reader liferea. Ubuntu bug 208135 has the details, apparently the internal browser does not correctly use the proxy authorisation. However, the actual feed puller does, so this results in odd articles with no images. This is another one which should be fixed in “Karmic Koala“.

As for the Rhythmbox bug mentioned previously, that one does not seem to be fixed in current Karmic. I tried an upgrade and then a fresh reinstall but Rhythmbox still exhibits the same problem. Perhaps it is made worse by Squid sending a text/html error page, but that is a standard feature of one of the most popular pieces of proxy software, not something crazy I’ve done with no thought. For once.

More proxy authentication bugs

David — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:36:54 +0000

Apparently there are now testing builds of Firefox that fix some of the bugs I mentioned previously. These will be in one of the 3.5 releases when they come around. There is much discussion about what is actually fixed, but for now I am forced to click through many authentication dialogs when I restart Firefox.

The other bug where Firefox would not save the proxy authentication details for one user is implicitly linked to the “remember passwords for sites” option. Personally I think they should be separate, but as both use HTTP basic authentication there is probably a very good reason for it.

In the spirit of finding more bugs, Rhythmbox also suffers when proxy authentication is enabled. The error "glib.GError: Proxy Authentication Required" hides on stderr (visible only if you run from the console) when attempting to play last.fm stations. Podcasts generate the cryptic “Error in podcast” (presumably because Squid returns a text/html page with the error details). Fortunately for radio stations the error is much clearer. The cause of all this pain is a bug in gvfs, noted and fixed in Gnome bugzilla as bug 586922. Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) is currently in testing and includes these fixes, so I will shortly update and see.

The pains of proxy authentication

David — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:57:55 +0000

A small network I manage uses Squid and today I decided to enable proxy authentication to improve security a little. This was fairly trivial, I ended up using HTTP “basic” authentication and an existing htpasswd style password file.

What was not trivial was the amount of bugs this unearthed in little more than 10 minutes. No changes were required to the Firefox configuration on clients, but a password dialog was presented for the first site browsed. And the second site. And the third one. On some client machines with the same version of Firefox, the checkbox “use password manager to remember..” was not present. This is marked as unconfirmed in bug 439733, but does seem be a problem.

Another problem occurs when Firefox starts. A lot of things happen when Firefox starts: RSS feeds are updated, addons are checked for new versions and all the previous pages that were open are loaded. Unfortunately, each one of these generates a password prompt. This particular issue is bug 475053.

Other programs are not perfect either. The default package/update manager in Ubuntu does not honour the authentication configured in the Gnome global settings. The cause? Synaptic runs as root, but the authentication details are stored in the user’s session. Ubuntu bug 13661 covers this, our local fix was to allow specific mirrors without authentication.

I’m sure this only scratches at the surface of problems that will appear, I will post again when any of the above are fixed.