Force Proxy On not working

Question

The "Force proxy on" function on RangerAdmin's Internet tab does not work.

Symptoms

N/A

Cause

This is probably due to different versions of IE and Windows using different types of proxy keys. This problem was first encountered when Microsoft changed the "Proxy Enable" registry key type from Binary to a DWORD with IE5.

 
Ranger's "Force Proxy On" function is no longer supported in Ranger 4. Recent releases have the configuration option greyed out in the RangerAdmin interface.

Resolution

To force the use of a proxy server it is normally necessary to manually configure the settings from within Internet Explorer for each user. Since this is impractical on a multi-user system Ranger can be used to silently merge the appropriate registry keys each time a user logs on.

 
This can be performed in two ways:

Option 1: Enable the use of the proxy for all users in all groups all the time

Add the following lines to the bottom of the preshell9x.rrg and/or preshellNT.rrg files (depending on workstation OS). These files are located in the server's Ranger directory or the machine's ranger directory in the case of Ranger Solo.

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings
"ProxyEnable"dword:00000001
"ProxyServer"":"
"ProxyOverride"""
"DisablePasswordCaching"dword:00000001

Note: Substitute and with the name of your proxy server and port. The ProxyOverride and DisablePasswordCaching entries are optional and allow these settings to be set for each user.

The registry entries in this file are automatically merged with the registry every time any user logs in, after their user.dat is transferred from the server (with roaming profiles).

This will ensure the proxy key is forced on for every user each time they log on.

Option 2: Enable the use of the proxy for individual groups

If it is necessary for proxy settings to be configured differently for different groups (eg: to enable certain groups access through the proxy and others not) then it is possible to set the above registry keys on a per group basis via a policy based ADM template. Download the following file and save it to your RangerAdmfiles directory.

Add the file to Ranger's policy templates via Editsettings

Configure the appropriate settings for each Ranger group

If after making the above changes the registry values are still not being correctly changed when you view them with Registry Editor, it may be possible that the settings are being overwritten by another program. To confirm, add a dummy key and check that value is being merged.

ie: "DummyProxyServer""test"

To workaround, copy the changes in (option 1) above to a file called ieproxy.rrg and merge it after logon as one of Ranger's scheduled jobs.

Schedule the following command to run on logon for each group:

Network Ranger:
RgrRegUp.exe rangerieproxy.rrg

Ranger Solo:
RgrRegUp.exe c:windowsprogr1rangerieproxy.rrg

This will silently merge the registry keys in ieproxy.rrg about 20 seconds after the user has logged on.