WPAD issues

[Duke5A]

Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong here?

 

Proxy: Squid3

DNS: Bind9

OS: Ubuntu 10.04

 

I've got a Squid proxy setup internally and I'm trying to get WPAD working for clients. So far I've got Internet Explorer working no problems since I did it with DHCP. Now I know just about every other browser doesn't support this implementation so it has to be done through DNS. I created an A entry in bind and wpad.mydomain.local resolves correctly at the command line using ping and nslookup. Firefox doesn't work though. I ran a packet sniffer on the client and Firefox is attempting to pull the auto configuration file from http://wpad/wpad.dat instead of using the FQDN http://wpad.mydomain.local/wpad.dat. When trying to browse directly to the WPAD file without the FQDN Firefox tells me it was unable to determine the IP address of wpad, yet I can ping and do an nslookup just fine at the command line. When using the FQDN I can get Firefox to browse to the configuration file without issue. Does anyone have any ideas? This is the last stumbling block of this project I have left... Thanks...

[Duke5A]

I figured it out, or well, at least I applied a band-aid by adding wpad to the hosts file on the proxy server.

 

This entire setup is for a guest wireless network and Squid is running in transparent mode so it'll grab outgoing HTTP requests and redirect to a TOS page that you have to agree to before Squid will let you out. Well, HTTPS doesn't work so well through a transparent proxy so this is where the WPAD setup comes into play. On the TOS page are directions for setting up browsers for auto proxy configuration. Once done, they'll pick up the Squid proxy and connect directly to it instead of having to rely on the transparent setup, thus making HTTPS happy. This whole setup feels like a Rube Goldberg machine, but it actually works really well.

[tom_newton]

There's a couple of auto detect websites for both Microsoft and Apple - you might try blocking them, because then you get "you might need to sign in" on your desktop/i-device. This is a bit unpredictable mind, so if you're happy where you are i'd let sleeping dogs lie