This is mainly a rant post.

I have to use Zscaler on my work PC. I use Sway (Moved from Gnome -> i3 -> sway).

Whenever Zscaler is launched, I used to get a weird error “proxy server not found” but it continued to work otherwise. Now at my company, we used a proxy at one time but we shifted to a no-proxy connection recently.

So I checked all my environment variables, output of set command. Everything was fine. People said it could be because of some weird compliance issue, or kernel etc etc. After a week or so, I gave up on debugging it because most of my work was fine with the 50% functional Zscaler.

One day, I opened Gnome instead of Sway to check something else, and saw that my proxy was on. This is the proxy set in Gnome Settings, not environment file.

I initially dismissed this finding because I thought Gnome is not active during sway so it should not affect it. But then i remembered it’s possible to access the gnome settings using gsettings from any distro.

I switched to Sway, and sure enough, when I ran gsettings get org.gnome.system.proxy.http host, I could see the proxy IP. I set it to null and behold! Zscaler was working perfectly.

I’m like “Who the hell designs software like this? The application should read the environment variables, not Gnome variables!”

Anyway, this was just a reminder to software makers to kindly follow the norms. Don’t design your software for one Distro. Follow the guidelines as mentioned in freedesktop.

  • aberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)@midwest.socialEnglish
    5·
    22 hours ago

    Follow the guidelines as mentioned in freedesktop

    Which guidelines are you talking about? Searching for “proxy” and “environment variables” didn’t pull up anything I saw that would be relevant in this case. I’ve been using linux for a couple of decades now and I’m not sure what rule is being broken here.

    It sounds like you didn’t have a proxy set in your environment variables, but you did have one set through another means. It’s somewhat standard practice to have fall-through settings, where if settings aren’t set in one place, a program looks in another place, then maybe another, etc. Now admittedly it would be nice to have a way to disable functionality entirely, but usually that kind of thing happens with command line flags.

    I get that it’s frustrating to deal with a problem like this, but ultimately your environment was misconfigured, and that’s going to break some software.