Microsoft’s ISA server firewall is the tool used every where on networks in Pakistan and it is the second most common problem for Linux advocates in Pakistan. The first most common problem is getting drivers for win modems.
My Cable Internet service provider also uses the same stupid MS ISA server firewall. They are a nice group of guys but they act crazy sometimes. This time, they updated the servers and forced me to authenticate to a proxy server. No big deal, I knew how to get around this trouble but this time they had gone totally mad and configured the sever to accept HTTP requests from Mozilla and IE only.
I was unable to download updates using either synaptic or apt-get. Fortunately I found Micheal Carden’s Ubuntu – ntlmaps post and it solved all my problems. Not that I was unaware of ntlmaps but actually I was unable to get it configure to use my proxy. Micheal Carden’s post explained how he solved this by moving the server.cfg from /etc/ntlmaps/ to /usr/lib/site-python/ntlmaps/main.py. This ntlmaps thing just works!
