http proxy:suggestion

[shuttlebox]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 3:49 PM, David Lee <t.d.lee at durham.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>  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'm all for supporting environment variables like http_proxy but if
the scripts should be overhauled it would be better if they were made
in a more Unix generic way. Sysconfig isn't even a Linux standard but
a Red Hat one. :-)

-- 
/peter