http proxy:suggestion

[David Lee]

Julian: A suggestion to assist large sites which sit behind tight
firewalls...

The "cron.daily" scripts "update_phishing_sites" and "update_spamassassin"
need to reach out to remote websites.  But at some large sites, the
general practice is for web browsers to divert via a cache service. In
this context the MS "update*" scripts are web clients (pseudo-browsers)
and so the site-friendly way for the sites to work would be to honour any
"http_proxy" environment variable.

That is almost, but not quite, already in place.  (Run manually, with
explicit "http_proxy", it works.)

What still seems absent is recognising "http_proxy" when run under "cron".

Those scripts already do:
   if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner ] ; then
        . /etc/sysconfig/MailScanner
   fi

But that file seems oriented to variables specific to "MailScanner.conf".

Could there also be a "/etc/sysconfig/MailScannerEnv" (or similar) whose
purpose would be for environment variables for scripts?

(I suppose the whole lot could be overloaded into the existing "sysconfig"
file; my reason for suggesting a second file was a clean separation
between script/envir variables and MS.conf variables.)

Just a thought.

What would be your recommendation for getting "http_proxy" recognised by
those scripts under cron?


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