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Friday February 17, 2006

Ubuntu Behind a Firewall

Ubuntu is a really nice Linux distribution, but I have to wonder about ease-of-use for those corporate users stuck behind a firewall, like me.

From my post on Monday, I received a comment showing me how I could "easily" setup a GNOME development environment on my Ubuntu system.

Yesterday I found some time to try it. apt-get didn't like being behind a firewall. Fair enough, I just need to give it a proxy server to go through. I noticed that there was a Network Proxy entry in the System menu in gnome-panel, so I clicked on that and set all of the entries to <myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com and port 8080.

Nope, that didn't fix it. I was then told about the Synaptic Package Manager (under the System -> Administration menu), and this has a Network menu entry under it's Settings->Preferences menu. I clicked on that, and also setup my proxies there.

Nope, that didn't fix it. I then googled about and discovered that I had to create an /etc/apt/apt.conf file and add the following lines:

ACQUIRE {
  http::proxy "http://<myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com:8080/"
}

After this (and maybe an "sudo apt-get update" - I'm not sure), I get a little popup appearing saying that I have 66 updates to download. A couple of clicks later those have been installed and I'm upto date for all the supplied packages. Cool.

Now back to installing the GNOME Development environment. I found that I needed to uncomment several lines in /etc/apt/sources.list and follow that with an "sudo apt-get update" before I could finally do:

  % sudo apt-get install gnome-devel

It's probably possible to do the equivalent to this in the Synaptic Package Manager. I didn't check.

One more concern. I initially configured the Ubuntu system to use DHCP. I now want to use Synergy so I can control this system (and a couple others) from the same keyboard and mouse. To that end, I wanted to change to a static IP address. That appeared to be easy to do, but after I'd done it (and rebooted), apt-get then started bitchin' with Could not resolve '<myproxy.mysubdomain>' which was strange as I'd put the full <myproxy.mysubdomain>.sun.com name in all the places mentioned above.

I "fixed" this by adding an entry in my /etc/hosts file:

    www.xxx.yyy.zzz      <myproxy.mysubdomain> <myproxy>

but I gotta wonder why it's needed.

Maybe a Ubuntu expert can tell me where I went wrong with all of this. Is there an easier way to do this?

[Technorati Tag: Ubuntu]

[Technorati Tag: Ease Of Use]

( Feb 17 2006, 07:55:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [6]

Comments:

That's strange; the System -> Preferences menu proxy works for apt on mine. (I am running Dapper.)

Posted by Phil on February 17, 2006 at 08:11 AM PST #

Editing your /etc/apt/sources.list file is done with a couple of checkboxes in synaptic, it's under the repositories thing.

Posted by Dean on February 17, 2006 at 09:04 AM PST #

Yup. I suspected as much. Thanks Dean! So many apps. So little time.

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 17, 2006 at 09:11 AM PST #

Why is it that you want to use a static IP address for synergy? Do you not have DNS in the office?
<p/> I realize that you are probably running Solaris and/or Windows workstations as well, but if you were just using Ubuntu, you could install avahi zeroconf for resolving hostnames using mDNS. Unfortunately AFAIK it is Linux only at the moment. But I don't know what mDNS responders work on Solaris and Windows. <p/> To set it up in breezy you need to install the avahi-daemon, avahi-utils, and libnss-mdns packages. You also have to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf, and add "mdns" to the end of the "hosts:" line. <p/> Then you could use a synergy configuration such as:

  section: screens
    hostname1.local:
    hostname2.local:
  end

  section: links
  ...

<p/> NOTE: This will be enabled by default in dapper if I'm not mistaken.

Posted by Kyle Ambroff on February 17, 2006 at 10:28 AM PST #

I wanted to use a static IP address so that the entry for that machine in my .synergy.conf file on the Synergy server machine doesn't have to be (potentially) altered every time I rebooted the machine. I've no idea what IP address (or hostname) its likely to assign to me.

You're right that I want to use this on Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows as well.

I'll investigate mDNS further. Thanks.

Posted by Rich Burridge on February 17, 2006 at 10:43 AM PST #

Sounds like some odd breakage somewhere. Setting http_proxy and ftp_proxy variables in your environment should work for most command-line apps, including apt-get. And setting the proxy in Synaptic's preferences dialog should sort that out (although it really should use GNOME's desktop proxy settings if possible). I use both methods behind Sun's firewall with Ubuntu pretty much every day of the week, and they work fine for me.

Posted by Calum Benson on February 19, 2006 at 09:15 AM PST #