manage connection to proxy for local sites

Question

I'm an admin for a company and my company has internal network, and also it has internet access.

All users from inside the company configured to use a proxy server, and all their URL queries will go through the proxy, including local network queries - so they can't access local sites. Is there any way to manage those queries without making changes directly on the workstations?

I can't force all users to change their settings in the browser, so there is no way to change it client-side.

How did you configure the proxy settings on the client computers? — Michael Hampton, Sep 01 '13 at 20:22
from the browser settings , I'm using windows 7 and Mozilla firefox 23 — Eibo, Sep 01 '13 at 20:26
actually I know that solution , but I need something from the server side , because not all my clients will change their configuration . is that possible ?? — Eibo, Sep 01 '13 at 20:35
If you look at my answer, it should become immediately clear why @MichaelHampton's question is important, and what it refers to. If not, your company really needs to hire a qualified systems admin. — Falcon Momot, Sep 01 '13 at 21:05

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '13 at 21:02

You can do one of several things depending on your environment.

If you are using windows, and have active directory, and your versions are relatively recent, and if you were using internet explorer or if firefox is configured to use the "system proxy settings", you can use a GPO to specify the sites excluded from proxying. This is fairly trivial to do using the GPO GUI in gpedit.msc.

If you are using WPAD to configure your proxy settings (as would be the classical solution for proxy configuration in firefox), change your wpad.dat (or other proxy autoconfiguration file) to contain a rule which matches these intranet sites of yours, and return the string DIRECT for them. This will cause those sites to be excluded from proxying.

Finally, regardless of what you are doing, you can make the intranet sites accessible to the proxy. This will proxy all the intranet traffic as well as the internet traffic, which might be contrary to your intent, though this will not normally pose a significant security risk on a correctly configured proxy server.

manage connection to proxy for local sites

1 Answers1