Bill Benac's Blog

To access the public Internet from many enterprise environments, one needs to configure the browser on his or her laptop to go through a proxy server. Sometimes, this requirement applies as well to the servers that run ALUI as well. With a browser, it's a fairly straight forward point-and-clickety-clickety-click to enter the proxy information, but with ALUI products, it's more involved. It seems like I always need to check my old emails to find configuration instructions, so I'll post here to make it easier for me, and hopefully easier for you too.

Of the several core ALUI products, only a few need proxy information. Products like the Search or Document Repository server of course do not need to make requests to resources outside of the ALUI servers. The portal is the most obvious component for doing so. You might have a some portlets provide by Google for example that users should be able to access. The portal's proxy is configured by updating %ALUI_HOME%\settings\common\serverconfig.xml to use the following settings:

<component name="openhttp" type="http://www.plumtree.com/config/component/types/openhttp">
        <!-- Leave the following ProxyServer value blank if you have no HTTP Proxy Server. -->
        <setting name="openhttp:ProxyURL">
            <value xsi:type="xsd:string">http://www-proxy.myco.com:31060</value>
        </setting>
        <setting name="openhttp:ProxyUsername">
            <value xsi:type="xsd:string">
        </value>
        <setting name="openhttp:ProxyPassword">
            <value xsi:type="xsd:string">
        </value>
        <setting name="openhttp:ProxyBypassLocal">
            <value xsi:type="xsd:boolean">true</value>
        </setting>
        <!-- Use semicolon-separated list for local addresses, -->
        <!-- e.g., www.example.com;*.plumtree.com -->
        <setting name="openhttp:ProxyBypass">
    <value xsi:type="xsd:string">localhost;*.myco.com</value>
        </setting>
</setting></setting></component>

A less obvious component that should be configured for proxy access is the automation server.  In some cases, portal administrators and content managers may choose to create a job that runs a portlet web service as its operation. One reason to do this is to generate the HTML that comes from a slow-running dynamic portlet. Antoer reason to do this could be if the code behind an URL ran some job. The automation server uses the same proxy setting configuration that the portal does in %ALUI_HOME%\settings\common\serverconfig.xml.

Finally, the new Remote Portlet Service's RSS Reader needs a proxy configured in order to get feeds outside the enterprise. The settings are to be put in %ALUI_HOME%\remoteps\1.0\settings\config\wrapper.conf. In myco's case, the proper settings were:

wrapper.java.additional.22=-Dhttp.proxyHost=www-proxy.myco.com
wrapper.java.additional.23=-Dhttp.proxyPort=31060
wrapper.java.additional.24=-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts="localhost|*.myco.com"

It is important to follow the example settings in the file correctly. The nonProxyHosts setting needs to be in quotation marks, but the proxyHost and proxyPort should not be.

It is also important to not follow the example settings with regard to the setting number. The file suggests:

#wrapper.java.additional.19=-Dhttp.proxyHost=
#wrapper.java.additional.20=-Dhttp.proxyPort=
#wrapper.java.additional.21=-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=

However, 19, 20, and 21 are used by previous settings, so the proper wrapper.java.additional numbers will be increased as shown in the myco example.

Enjoy!

Originally posted on http://blog.billbenac.com.