[rhn-users] up2date, rhn, proxy servers and the user agent string

[Todd Warner]

On Thu, 18 Mar 2004, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:

> [Apologies if you already saw this on redhat general; it's
> been suggested that I should repost this here.]
> 
> I ran into a situation using RHEL WS 3.0 where the up2date & rhnlib code
> weren't going through my organization's proxy server. It turned out
> that there were two reasons for this: First, when rhnlib tried
> to CONNECT to the https proxy, it did not include the User-Agent:
> header (it's just the CONNECT http message that is missing this
> header). Second, I needed to change the user agent header used
> by rhnlib to an older string that was recognized by the proxy server.
> 
> I made the required changes in the rhnlib, up2date and rhn-applet packages
> and have patches (and SRPMS for that matter) which
> 
>  (a) Fix the https proxy bug
>  (b) Allow end-user configuration of the User-Agent header
>  (c) Respect a userAgent setting in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date
>  (d) Add a --userAgent command line option to up2date
>  (e) Modify rhn-applet to use the userAgent setting and
>      read the value out of ~/.rhn-applet.conf
> 
> These currently only are known to work (for me) with RHEL 3.0 and
> the RHN back end, but it would probably not be difficult to make
> them work for other situations.
> 
> I expect to forward these to Red Hat through our support contract,
> but I don't know if they'd accept them or how long it would be
> before they'd be available through there. There's at least one
> string that would have to be internationalized before it could be
> released to production. Anyway if anyone else would find these
> patches useful, please let me know, or if there is sufficient interest,
> I'll post them on this (or another if more appropriate) list.
> 
> --Bob Drzyzgula

Patches gladly accepted. Send 'em our way and we'll take a look-see.
rhnlib and up2date are GPLed software so... there you go.

Definately sounds like something is funky though. I will make sure the
right people know about it.

-- 
____________
 /odd Warner                                    <taw@{redhat,pobox}.com>
          Bit Twiddler - Operation Cheetah Flip - Red Hat Inc.
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"But when you think about it, it's mostly the bad decisions we make
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