Using Proxy between Notification Server and Altiris Agents

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The Altiris Agent isn't communicating through my proxy on Windows XP* systems. It seems to be fine on Windows 2000 and 2003 systems.

Cause

The exact cause is not known at this time, but there are two points in this issue:

1. The proxy information is not populated from the Internet Explorer* settings.
2. Even when the settings are manually populated the agent will still not communicate through the proxy.

Resolution

At this time there is no direct solution. Altiris is aware that the Altiris agent does not communicate through proxy on Windows XP systems and this issue is slated to be resolved in Service Pack 3 for Notification Server 6.0.

When running into situations where the client is using a proxy but the agent doesn't seem to be communicating with the Notification Server, the following registry value should be checked as it could be missing the correct settings.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Communications\Proxy Last Resort] (DWORD)

• 0 = Will force the agent to use proxy only
• 1 = The agent will attempt to connect to the NS, if it gets an ICMP unreachable message it will try to use the proxy

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Communications\Proxy Server] = <proxy_name> (STRING)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Communications\Proxy Port] = <port_number>(DWORD)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Communications\Proxy Auto Detect](DWORD)

• 0 = Do not try to auto detect
• 1 = Use the settings specified in IE, need to remember if a PAC file is used, the user should set it to 0 and set Proxy Port and Proxy Server values

When using Auto Detect, if the agent computer is a NT computer and there is an interactive user logged on, Altiris gets the setting from:

[HKEY_USERS\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

Otherwise it picks up the the default computer settings from:

[HKEY_USERS\.Default\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

Alternatively if the Agent is running on a 9x computer, it gets the settings from:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

The Proxy Mode key is normally created when the Agent is pushed to a computer that has proxy support enabled. Other methods used by customers to distribute the Agents may not create this registry key properly.

Applies To
Notification Server 6.0