Prox settings with Zotero standalone + Chrome

ervan-CH

Dear All,

Every time I launch Zotero standalone, I get an invite to enter my credentials of my institution's proxy. Apparently I succeeded to save those once (as they automatically appear in the proxy login window), but those are outdated. I couldn't find the way to modify my proxy's credentials neither in Zotero stda.(as the proxy tab doesn't exist anymore), nor in Chrome.
Thank you for your suggestion. Regards,

adamsmith

Zotero does that so that syncing will work when you're going through a proxy. I'm pretty sure the save credentials, though, have nothing to do with Zotero, they'd just be saved in Chromes password settings, which you can access by pasting chrome://settings/passwords into the Omnibox.

ervan-CH

Hi Adam,
Thank you very much for your prompt answer. I checked for any stored password and cleaned them all. Nothing in there. The message I get relates to Mozilla: "moz-proxy://xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:**** is requesting a username and password", but I don't have Firefox installed on my machine. Strange.

aurimas

These should be in Standalone, not Chrome (Standalone is closely related to Firefox, which is why there are often references to Mozilla in the messages).

You should be able to clear your usernames/passwords by deleting a file in Zotero Standalone _profile_ directory. If you're using the default data directory, then you can get to the profile directory via Preferences -> Advanced -> Files and Folders ("Use profile directory" should be checked) -> Show Data directory, then go one directory _up_ and you will be in the profile directory. If you're not using the default directory, see https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data for possible locations of your profile directory (remember, the _profile_ directory is one level up from the _data_ directory).

Once you're in the profile directory, close Zotero, and delete signons.sqlite file (make a backup first, just in case). Start Zotero again.

dstillman

I'm a bit confused. Why can't you just type in the correct credentials in the prompt that pops up? As far as I know it just saves the last credentials you used.

ervan-CH

Thanks Aurimas for your advice. I'll try to dig in into the directory and find the relevant info.

@ Dan: some people do prefer to lose a bit of time once rather than every day... that's the beauty of life ;)

Cheers!

dstillman

No, see my edit — I'm saying that I would expect it to automatically save the updated credentials you enter. Is that not happening? There's no way to explicitly save proxy credentials, so this should just work. If it doesn't, that seems like a Mozilla bug.

aurimas

@Dan, can you point me to the code that performs this automatic proxy detection in Standalone? I'm having a hard time locating it. (I'm just curious to see how this works)

ervan-CH

Nope! The old credentials keep on coming up. So annoying! But I'll try to delete the credentials directly into the directy, as proposed by Aurimas. Once reset, I hope the new credentials can be saved. Thanks to all for your help. I'll let you know if I was able to fix it.

dstillman

@Dan, can you point me to the code that performs this automatic proxy detection in Standalone?

We don't really do much of anything, which is why I say this is probably a Mozilla bug. Our init code runs Zotero.HTTP.triggerProxyAuth(), which checks to see if a PAC file is installed, and if so it gets a URL from the prefs and runs Zotero.HTTP._proxyAsyncResolve(url), which checks with nsIProtocolProxyService to see if the URL would require a proxy. If it would, we make a HEAD request, which causes XULRunner to pop up the prompt. So any saving that's happening or not is happening completely separately from Zotero code.

ervan-CH

Hi Dan & Aurimas,
Thanks a lot. Deleting the 'signons.sqlite' file solved the problem! After doing this operation, I had a blank credential window and no more pop-up credentials afterwards.
Regards,
Ervan

dstillman

(Well, it's a little more complicated than what I said — we do a general check for an S3 URL and then, if a PAC file is installed, several more for various journal URLs. (These are checks against the proxy service, not necessarily HTTP requests.))

ervan-CH

Sorry to spam your mailbox, but I just restarted Zotero stda and the proxy credentials window was blank.. obviously, there is a bug with the credentials saving option.
My 2 cents.
E

dstillman

Not sure what you're saying. Meaning it didn't save at all this time?

Was signons.sqlite recreated?

ervan-CH

Yes, that's what I meant. Nothing has been saved this time. I keep having blank credentials invite. The signons.sqlite was recreated though (just checked).

dstillman

OK, thanks. We'll look into it. It's possible a previous version of the Mozilla framework auto-saved the proxy credentials and new versions don't do that anymore.

aurimas

In Standalone, go to Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> about:config. Type in "signon", you will see a number of preferences appear. First, make sure that none of them are bold and they all say "default", then change the signon.autologin.proxy setting to true. Restart Zotero and see if it helps.

dstillman

(I've been meaning to turn that on in Standalone — which we may not have to, since Mozilla is trying to do the same — but I'm not sure why should make a difference in terms of password saving. Let's see, though.)