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Web-Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD)
Most browsers are able to automatically detect the web proxy configuration using
Web-Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD). The browser needs to download a config file
from a web server. Publishing via DHCP is one of the methods WPAD specifies to
determine the URL of this config file. Yet only Microsoft Internet Explorer supports this
distribution method, provided that DHCP is enabled. An alternative DNS based solution
is supported by all major browsers and does not require DHCP.
Make sure that automatic proxy detection is enabled in the
browsers.
Enable WPAD via DHCP
Yet only Microsoft's Internet Explorer supports the DHCP based approach. It's also
required, that the workstation itself uses SX-GATE as its DHCP server.
If a third-party DHCP server is used, the WPAD URL has to be
deployed on that server. Enter the URL "http://<SX-GATEs LAN
IP>:8000/proxy.pac" if you want to use SX-GATE's predefined
Proxy Autoconf file.
Enable WPAD via DNS
Here you can enable a DNS based method. The browser tries to download the file
"wpad.dat" from a server named "wpad.<LOCAL DOMAIN<".
Specify the network domain configured on your workstations here. SX-GATE will then
set up appropriate DNS entries in its name server and instruct the intranet web server
to redirect requests for "wpad.dat" to
"http://<SX-GATE's LAN-IP>:8000/proxy.pac"
. This is a predefined config file which instructs the browsers to use SX-GATE as web
proxy.
If the workstations are in different subdomains (e.g.
"sales.example.com" and "management.example.com"), enter
the domain part they have in common ("example.com").