Temporarily disable proxy redirection
I move between home and work a lot. When I'm at work, I don't need to use a proxy - (in fact, it slows down browsing significantly) and I haven't found a quick way to disable redirection through proxies without deleting the proxy and losing the saved sites, etc.
It would be nice to have a toggle in the proxy settings that would simply turn off proxy redirection entirely. Bonus points if you can do it automatically by IP address / mask.
It would be nice to have a toggle in the proxy settings that would simply turn off proxy redirection entirely. Bonus points if you can do it automatically by IP address / mask.
Here are some suggestions for how to add the temporary disable to the UI, in order of increasing ease of use and increasing difficulty of implementation:
- Add a "Disable proxies" checkbox to the Proxies tab of the Preferences window.
- Add a "Disable" checkbox column to the "Configured proxies" table, in the Preferences window under the Proxies tab. (This would allow the user to disable individual proxies.)
- Add a "Disable proxies" toggle to the Zotero Actions menu button (the "gear" menu button that also contains Import, Preferences, and About Zotero).
- Add a "Disable proxies" button to the Zotero button bar (the one that contains the New Collection, New Group, and Action menus). Would this be UI clutter?
- Auto-detect whether to use a proxy based on current IP address. I am not sure there is the infrastructure in Firefox to support this, and it has the possibility of making things quite complicated. But for cases like mine, having a single proxy entry with a setting for "Do not use this proxy when my IP address is A.B.*.* or C.D.E.*" would be perfect.
To solve this problem, I'd need zotero to not use a proxy for certain parts of a domain - ie: filter on the whole url, rather than just the domain, as seems to be the case at the moment.
A nice solution may be for the university (or someone associated to it) to prepare some metadata describing which web resources can/must/may be accessed through the proxy, and while we're at it, which ip addresses don't require the proxy.
What's are examples of patterns where it's needed and not needed?
Thanks for your envolvement here. It's what makes open source rock (:
The specific example I met just now has this page not served by the proxy:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0
with a 404 - not found http error if you try, and this page served (and needed if I'm off campus):
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5h26p8ng22018281/
with a proxied url like:
http://www.springerlink.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/content/5h26p8ng22018281/
I'm guessing I need to use the proxy for url's that start with
http://www.springerlink.com/content/*
The current preferences page for proxies asks for a 'host name' (eg:www.springerlink.com) to decide when to use the proxy. I havn't tried putting a url stem in there, and unfortunately I may not be able for a while: the proxy doesn't work from the office (where I am now) and I just upgraded my ubuntu at home, only to find the wifi card isn't initialising properly, so no internet at home till I fix it or find a long ethernet cable ):
Sometimes errors occur, e.g
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12900/emerald-translator-report-id-278093088/
and it would be good to be able to turn off proxies just in case they're causing the issue.
thanks.
There is another use case for the temporary disabling of an automatic university library proxy: If we want to send a link to a paper to a colleague at another university, we cannot get a link from Zotero that is proxy-free, and the proxied link is useless to anyone outside our institution.
Zotero is all about sharing, but even View Online takes us to a proxied URL.
I use Zotero every day, dropped EndNote 2 years ago and never looked back. Because it is so easy to drag and drop a Zotero item from Zotero to an electronic notebook, I constantly miss this feature when I just want to make a colleague aware of a paper by posting it in Slack. We just want to be able to drag from Zotero and drop an active link to the reference anywhere. Is that possible?