Corporate proxy block all traffic except HTTP through a proxy server. How to use GEM or SVN, etc in Windows?

Question

Hello,

Our development team has spent countless hours setting up our individual Windows PCs to work with the corporate network. We work in a large company with tons of bureaucracy involved, which includes network access.

Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and many programming/forums websites are blocked due to faulty filtering settings, so are many other useful sites for coding.

To get this policy fixed will take months. We are trying to use Ruby Gems, SVN, and GIT, and many other command line tools that won't work due to network restrictions.

Question: Is there a way to socksify the entire Windows environment, so we don't have to individually set the proxy for each individual app?

Our environment is Windows XP.

Thanks, -John San Jose, California

Answer 1

Most applications on Windows that use sockets, go through the standard WinInet stack. Setting a proper proxy for Internet Explorer actually sets it for the whole WinInet stack as well, so it should work for other apps as well.

Note however, that you need to explicitly open the Advanced dialog for the proxy settings in IE and uncheck the Use same proxy for all protocols checkbox to be able to enables SOCKS support. Otherwise, the proxy settings only affect couple of protocols, so you would still need to configure your tools to use http: instead of tool-specific protocols like svn:.