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Making OpenSUSE 10.3 autoupdate (zypper) work with an authenticated proxy

Friday, 05 September 2008

I am running OpenSUSE 10.3 (x86_64) on one of my comptuers. It has problems running autoupdate because my computer is on a network that requires proxy authentication to access the outside world. I had posted a workaround on the Novell OpenSUSE Bugzilla before that fixed this problem earlier. But this workaround alone did not help this time around. You need another workaround too to make Zypper (YAST autoupdate) work. Read on.

In my previous post on Novell Bugzilla (Bug# 227511) , I had posted that you need to edit the /root/.curlrc like this to make Zypper work The post is reproduced here in its entirety:

------- Comment #14 From Senthil Nachimuthu 2007-10-07 10:58:50 MDT -------

I can replicate the same problem in openSUSE 10.3 GM (x86_64). Zypper (zypper
ar) or adding software repositories under "Yast > Software Repositories" fails
with a curl error 407. The problem is because curl doesn't read the proxy
authentication information (username/password).
The problem is in the /root/.curlrc file. The autogenerated file contains:
---------------------------------------------
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/19/07
--proxy-user "username:password"
--proxy "http://proxy.domain.com:8080"
---------------------------------------------
This file is missing the "=" (equal to) sign between the name and the value. I
modified this file manually to:
---------------------------------------------
# Changed by YaST2 module proxy 09/19/07
--proxy-user = "username:password"
--proxy = "http://proxy.domain.com:8080"
---------------------------------------------
After adding the = sign in this file, it works fine. 
This is a show stopper bug. Until this is fixed, users behind a corporate
firewall cannot update their opensuse 10.3 installation, making it unable to
apply security updates. Hence, I mark this as high priority. 
Please update the Suse proxy configuration tool to generate the /root/.curlrc
file correctly.

However, this alone doesn't work anymore on my network.

Here's one more workaround to fix the issue:

Edit the file /etc/sysconfig/proxy

Find the lines HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and FTP_PROXY, and add the authentication information in the proxy URL. That is, change

HTTP_PROXY="http://proxy.example.com:8080"

HTTP_PROXY="http://username: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it :8080"

Do the same for lines starting with HTTS_PROXY and FTP_PROXY.

You may need to do both the above workaround (edit both /root/.curlrc and /etc/sysconfig/proxy) to make Zypper work. Hope this helps.