I have written a script that will turn the proxy settings off and back on again after an allotted period but you often need to open up Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings and click OK for the browser to accept the change in settings (even if you have the browser closed). The proxy settings are sitting in the way of being able to browse to the locally hosted captive-portal. No matter what proxy exceptions we pre-add to the settings we can't get a 100% success rate. Does anyone have a better way of forcing the change through? Does anyone have a better way of doing this full stop?
I'm not looking for suggestions on how to write a script to change proxy settings necessarily as I have one, I also have a working proxy.pac file that I've been playing with.
Setup-wise, we have a proxy server that redirects traffic to an upstream web filtering server that we pay our ISP for, and we monitor people's usage using this. We want to enforce people's use of this setup when they are away from the office also, so they will need to VPN in to the network to access the internet when roaming. They can really, to a certain extent, browse what they want once they're in as we're not very strict at all but at the end of the day if you're doing it on your company machine we want to be able to report on it if we need to.
So the problem that we have is in the 5-minute window required for them to jump on a hotel wireless, authenticate to the captive-portal and VPN in. We could give users the rights to change their proxy settings but we don't believe that users will remember to turn it back on and may abuse it. As i say, we're fairly relaxed really as people can access most sites they like, but we just want that little bit of peace of mind to allow people to do what they want.
