Chapter 13. Tips for Using HIP with Some Applications

Table of Contents

Using HIP Enabled Proxy Server
Sendmail and Spamassassin

Using HIP Enabled Proxy Server

In the deployment phase, it is interesting to set-up a proxy server that translates the TCP/IP traffic into HIP. For instance, this is convenient in http proxy servers. Thus all http traffic between our host and the proxy server will benefit from the usage of HIP.

First of all, you should have installed and configured properly your proxy server to employ HIP. This includes alowing HITs to connect the server (settings in the httpd.conf file) and restarting httpd using HIP.

You have several options to enable the HIP proxy within Firefox. In the menu Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Connection Settings, you can choose:

Direct connection to the internet: To disable the usage of any proxy.

Auto-detect proxy settings for this network: To enable the auto-detection feature, you should configure the wpad.dat file that it is served by your proxy in the URL http://wpad.mynetwork.com/wpad.dat (or a similar one). The wpad.dat file should return the information of your HIP enabled proxy server at the end of the function FindProxyForURL(url, host).

Manual proxy configuration: To manually introduce the information about your HIP enabled proxy server. You should also identify the port number.

Automatic proxy configuration URL: To use a wpad.dat file that is not located in the default URL http://wpad.mynetwork.com/wpad.dat. With this feature, you can store a wpad.dat file in some other location of your server and Firefox will fetch it from this URL.

Once you have the proxy server and Firefox ready, you can restart Firefox under HIP with (please make sure that no other instances of Firefox are being run at that time):

hipconf run normal|opp firefox

Now your Firefox should be connected by HIP to your proxy server, enabling mobility and enhancing security from your proxy to your host.