[TriLUG] Installing ubuntu behind firewall/proxy

[Rick DeNatale]

On 1/25/06, Patrick Brewer <patwbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I decided to try ubunto on a machine at work, where we are "safely" behind the corp. firewall and proxy servers.  The install seems to offer no way to authenticate through the proxies to get additional packages from the internet.
>
> Worse than that I am finding that FireFox on ubunto will not recognize our proxy configuration either.  Firefox worked on previous RedHat install, on Knopix, so I know Linux Firefox will work through the proxies.
>
> This is ubunto 4.1. Has anyone run into similar problems?  If I get Firefox to work, is there away to get the package manager to do http requests through the proxy?

Ubuntu never had a 4.1 release, perhaps ubunto (whatever that is)
does/did. Generally in release numbers,  x.1 and x.10 don't mean at
all the same thing, any more than 192.168.0.1 and 192.168.0.10 are the
same ip address.

Ubuntu releases come out in April and October, and are numbered as
y.m  the releases so far have been

Warty or 4.10 released in October 2004
Hoary or 5.04 released in April 2005
and
Breezy or 5.10 released in October 2005

The next release is Dapper or 6.04 which will be released in April.

So you probably should be installing Breezy.

I'm not sure what you mean that you can't "authenticate through the
proxies to get additional packages from the internet."  There's no
authentication involved in connecting to the repositories.  Individual
packages can be signed to cryptographically prove the identity of the
source, but that's a different matter, and will only generate a
warning prompt if you don't have the correct public keys, and we're
getting way ahead of ourselves here.

Firefox is not involved in any way with package management on Ubuntu
or other debian based systems.

The package management tool (apt) uses either http or ftp to get
packages from repositories which are found in /etc/apt/sources.list. I
don't know what 4.10 did, but 5.04 and 5.10 populated this file with
http uris.  If you can't talk to these servers using standard http/ftp
protocols, I'd first suggest changing ftp: to http: in sources.list
since ftp tends to be more problematic with firewalls and proxies, and
if that doesn't work have a talk with your IT guys since it's almost
certainly a local problem.

--
Rick DeNatale

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