Re: [greenbaum@ti.com: cygwin setup and firewalls]

[Chris Faylor <cgf at cygnus dot com>]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 12:51:33PM -0500, Parker, Ron wrote:
>> From: DJ Delorie [mailto:dj@delorie.com]
>>Can someone test setup from behind a firewall?  I've gotten many
>>complaints about it not working when it needs to use a proxy to get to
>>the Internet.
>
>Is there a specific firewall that we are having problems with?
>
>I have only run setup.exe from behind a firewall that is why I coded it
>to use wininet.  That way it would use the same mechanism IE does to go
>through the firewall.  I did this for somewhat selfish reasons, our
>#(*&^ proxy at work ONLY works with IE and wininet compatible software.

The problem so far has not been that setup.exe can't connect.  The basic
problem seems to be that the HTML that setup.exe receives via a proxy
has a lot of extra stuff in it that wasn't being detected by setup's
simple parser.

I've been modifying setup.exe to deal with the cases as they come along
but I suspect that this might all be enormously simplified if we
abandoned the use of InternetOpenUrl as a method for retrieving
directory listings via ftp and used the ftp-specific stuff for
downloading individual files and directories instead.

>This leads me to a possible source of difficulty I hadn't considered.  If
>the user does not have IE 4 or higher properly configured to access the
>Internet through their firewall, setup will not be able to use the
>predefined information in wininet to download the source.  I should have
>realized this earlier and for that I apologize.  Now to come up with a
>working solution for this situation. Hmmm. I will have to look into this.

I haven't come across a case of someone having something set
inappropriately, AFAICT.  So far, the problems have just been of the "We
forgot to check for upper case!" or "This line is longer than the
buffer!" variety.

cgf