I completely skipped running Tiger on the Macs in my office — mostly over networking issues that never seem to have been resolved. We have two newer machines (both DP G5s) that came with Tiger installed. We found some workarounds for most of the issues, especially those dealing with our company’s proxy server.
In a desperate attempt at troubleshooting one of the Tiger machines, I upgraded it to Leopard. The upgrade was painless for the most part. Lotus Notes even launched and connected perfectly — which was my biggest concern. It all gave me the courage to install Leopard on my own 10.3 machine (I don’t even remember which cat that was anymore — Jaguar?) Again, all went well, including my Lotus Notes.
Unfortunately, Safari (or anything that uses Apple’s OS-based tools) still won’t connect through the proxy server, whether it’s through the pac file or by manually entering the proxy address. What’s worse — any app that makes the attempt crashes rather unceremoniously. Luckily, FireFox uses its own scheme and works fine.
I’ll have to see if SquidMan’s been updated for Leopard yet, but I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to rely on third-party tools at this stage in the game.
[UPDATE: HR Softworks’ “Authoxy” seem to work fine. More important than getting Safari to work is the fact that it allows Apple’s Software Update mechanism to work.]
November 19, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Maybe if you gave some further details on the type of firewall you are facing, and what the issues are, you could be helpd – but blaming Safari/Apple for what is most likely an amateurish implementation of firewall (regardless of the size of your company) is disingenuous at best.
I count a major communications/entertainment company amongst my clients, and their firewall (or network) is pathetically configured, so I can sympathize with your plight. Again, though, blaming Apple for that misplaces the blame.
Provide some further information (or contact me via email) and we can try to troubleshoot this.
November 19, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Maybe if you gave some further details on the type of firewall you are facing, and what the issues are, you could be helpd – but blaming Safari/Apple for what is most likely an amateurish implementation of firewall (regardless of the size of your company) is disingenuous at best.
I count a major communications/entertainment company amongst my clients, and their firewall (or network) is pathetically configured, so I can sympathize with your plight. Again, though, blaming Apple for that misplaces the blame.
Provide some further information (or contact me via email) and we can try to troubleshoot this.
November 20, 2007 at 11:31 am
It’s a pretty commonly know problem with ISA proxies, Harry — the Apple Discussion Boards have a lot of threads on this going back to early Tiger revs (Here’s a link to one). The issue seems to be with the Windows 2003 Proxy Server — MacWindows has a thread on it going back for the last couple of weeks. The fact that Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.3 (as well as all versions of Windows) worked with this version of the proxy server indicates to me it’s something that’s changed in Apple’s implementation. And I’m not so much looking to place blame as to find a fix.
I didn’t provide more details because I wasn’t making a plea for help, just relating a situation — but I do appreciate the offer.
November 20, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Fair enough – and I can fully understand the feelings — a large, entertainment and media based client of mine (really big) has a firewall making it impossible for iTunes to either grab album art, or get the radio stations list — even though that’s just regular http traffic.
Additionally, on the even of them launching their content being made available via iTunes, which was a big deal company wide, their firewall wouldn’t even allow the iTunes store connection – “not an approved application”. That was fun.
On the other hand, Apple has worked diligently with me a while back in order to make Quicktime streaming work through the same firewall (with an exception in the QT code, just to accommodate that particular case).
Oh yeah, and we’re also talking about MS based firewalls 🙁
I don’t doubt that things have changed on Apple’s end, that would cause this problem you’re encountering, especially seeing as how Apple is pushing their reliance evangelical support of standards further with Leopard. One approach would be to work with your IT/network staff, though if they are MS-KoolAid drinkers, I see little hopes in any resolution from that end – though you may be surprised.
I’ll check a bit on my end, along with some of my Apple relations, and dig up if there’s any solution on the horizon, and let you know.