© Copyright Robert Vasvari, 1993-2003.

Firewall Options:

The last two tabs in the Global Preferences Panel deal with firewall options.

If your company is protected from outside intrusion by a firewall, there are still various techniques you can use to enable RBrowser to communicate with the outside. Here is a short description for the solutions offered by RBrowser:

PROXIES TAB:

Do not use proxies on the local network:
If this option is on, accessing local addresses will not use any proxies. Local address is determined by matching the local system's network address against the target host's. If the remote host name does not contain a domain, it is considered local.

Local network addresses:
Shows the network address of the local host. Sometimes, there are more than one, if the host has multiple network interfaces. If the proxies are not used on the local network (previous option), this is the nework address on which proxies will not be used.

Do not use proxies on the following domains (and hosts):
You can list any hostname or network mask here that you do not want to use proxies on. This list can be in this format:
myHost1,192.42.172,myhost.something.com,otherdomain.com

For each remote connection, RBrowser will use these entries to figure out whether or not to use the proxies.

Firewall Tab:
Currently, SOCKS (4 and 4A), FTP Firewall Toolkit and Http Proxy servers are supported. SOCKS 4A allows the client to do name resolution through the proxy server. The proxy server is a host that communicates directly with the outside. If SOCKS is turned on, RBrowser will communicate with the outside through this proxy server. Your system administrator should be able to tell you the name (or IP addresses) of this host.

SOCKS Port:
The proxy server listens for incoming connections on this port. Defaults to 1080.

SOCKS Server:
Name (or IP address) of the Proxy Server.

Name Resolution:
Decides how RBrowser will resolve remote host names into IP addresses.

Default: Local first, then proxy - for most cases this is the best solution, giving you the best of both worlds. If the local host can resolve a name, it is almost always the preferred (and faster) way. If for some reason this is not desirable, you can limit RBrowser to use either the local host only or the proxy only to resolve names.

FTP Firewall Toolkit:
This protocol consists of an FTP proxy which acts like the remote FTP server you are trying to connect to. The proxy simply forwards all commands to the remote host and gets the replies back to the client (the Local host). This option applies to all FTP connections. If you want just one connection to use a Firewall Toolkit, you can "fake" this using the following method: Put the proxy (the host running the Firewall Toolkit) name into the Host field. Put Username@TargetHostName into the User field. This will have the same effect as applying the Firewall Toolkit in the Global Preferences Panel, but it will apply only to this connection.

Default port for proxy:
Defaults to 21 (the default FTP port). If this toolkit is used, the FTP port on the FTP Connection Preferences Panel is ignored. This port is used to communicate with the proxy.

Proxy Server:
Name of the server that implements the Firewall Toolkit protocol. This server may or may not be the same as the SOCKS proxy.

HTTP Proxy support:

RBrowser now has support for HTTP proxy server to be used during downloads from the Login Panel. The options entered here will be passed on the download agent (curl by default).

Network installation:

If your site is already configured to use SOCKS, you can set up RBrowser such that any new user will automatically get the correct setting for the Firewall Panel. Inside the app wrapper there is a file called GlobalDefaults.xml. This file is used as a default if the user does not have any options set. You can edit this file as follows: if you want to turn on SOCKS and have a proxy named, just edit the appropriate lines:

<key>RBSocksProxyServer</key>
<string>mySOCKSServer.mydomain.com</string>
<key>RBUseSocksProxy</key>
<string>YES</string>

You can similarly edit any of the rest of the options. Be careful! If this file is not in the proper xml property list format, RBrowser will not start up (save the original)!