Bug 753953

I'm adding Máirín Duffy who seems to know about GUI design, and hopefully would comment about the need for easy proxy configuration.

Keep in mind that many companies and universities *require* a proxy, and without such configuration, nothing from the network is accessible. In these cases the user would just scratch his/her head wonder why is it that Fedora installation hanged.

Hi Felipe,

So your use case is that you're behind a company or university network, and your internet access requires the use of a proxy to hit points outside of the organization's network. For your use case, you don't need a different proxy per URL... you just need one proxy applied to any URL you try to hit from within anaconda.

We do also have a use case for folks who are within a company network, where they're using an external mirror for their main install source over http but also need to add an add-on repo or two that is hosted internally on a corporate network that requires a proxy. There feasibly could be a situation where routing all network traffic through the proxy would cause issues for one or more of the repos involved depending on where it's routed from. So we can't remove the per-URL proxy configuration. 

However, this bug identified an issue to me - in our current UI redesign mockups, we only have proxy configuration available for http install sources (see http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Prototypes/Previews/hubandspoke-preview6.png). You can configure it without having to error out first, but the configuration as designed right now only applies to the main install source, not to any add-on repos.

Now I'm beginning to think maybe we should move the proxy configuration to the networking screen instead and have it effect all URLs across anaconda, and for folks who need per-URL proxys, add individual optional proxy 'overrides' for individual repos. 

What do you think? Would this change make it easier for you to install?

(In reply to comment #2)
> So your use case is that you're behind a company or university network, and
> your internet access requires the use of a proxy to hit points outside of the
> organization's network. For your use case, you don't need a different proxy per
> URL... you just need one proxy applied to any URL you try to hit from within
> anaconda.

Exactly.

> We do also have a use case for folks who are within a company network, where
> they're using an external mirror for their main install source over http but
> also need to add an add-on repo or two that is hosted internally on a corporate
> network that requires a proxy. There feasibly could be a situation where
> routing all network traffic through the proxy would cause issues for one or
> more of the repos involved depending on where it's routed from. So we can't
> remove the per-URL proxy configuration.

Nobody is asking to remove the per-URL proxy configuration, but you can have in addition a global one.

Moreover, to *really* make things smooth an ideal configuration would have an entry to avoid the proxy for certain URLs, and also, have proxypac configuration (the institutions usually have this kind of magic configuration, where the right proxy is returned for the right URL). This of course would require better proxy support in yum (say, through libproxy, bug #542224).

This way the user could provide http://proxyconf/proxy.pac, and be done with it.

> However, this bug identified an issue to me - in our current UI redesign
> mockups, we only have proxy configuration available for http install sources
> (see
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Prototypes/Previews/hubandspoke-preview6.png).
> You can configure it without having to error out first, but the configuration
> as designed right now only applies to the main install source, not to any
> add-on repos.

I'm not sure about the add-on repos, but it's per-URL, yeah. And it's annoying to have to wait until it errors out (several minutes).

> Now I'm beginning to think maybe we should move the proxy configuration to the
> networking screen instead and have it effect all URLs across anaconda, and for
> folks who need per-URL proxys, add individual optional proxy 'overrides' for
> individual repos.

The URL's to avoid is usually enough, but you could re-use the existing per-URL proxy configuration. It's just that it would still be annoying to wait for the error. Maybe there should be a way to get the error sooner.

> What do you think? Would this change make it easier for you to install?

Definitely :)

Is there any chance of this moving forward?

If not, let's just be honest and say WONTFIX.

Doesn't look like there's enough interest.

Felipe, there is interest. We've undergoing a major overhaul of the UI.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Felipe, there is interest. We've undergoing a major overhaul of the UI.

Oh, cool :)

Yes, I've been following your blog, I just didn't see anything related to proxies.

I have some notes regarding proxy configuration here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Network#Anaconda_UX_redesign
I think we should have setting for all repositories overridable by per-repository setting, both in sw source spoke (because they would apply just to sw source).

The new ui in anaconda-18.3 includes this functionality.