Friday, January 16, 2009

Lock Firefox Proxy and other Settings

Locking Firefox settings in a multi-user Linux system can be a bit difficult and the information out there varies in quality. A while ago I found a script written by Andy Rabagliati of http://wizzy.org.za that automatically created the correctly formated config file and updated the Firefox settings to import the config file.

Recently when I used it on Ubuntu I ran into issues so I modified the script to account for the way Ubuntu separates the browser from xulrunner.

Here is a link to the updated script http://timlegge.googlepages.com/moz-lock.pl.

To run the script simply pass it the ip address of the proxy server as follows:
sudo ./moz-lock.pl 192.168.0.254
There are numerous additional settings that can be enabled at the bottom of the script. Currently the following settings are enabled:
  1. Set the cache size to 10 megs
  2. Do not hide the tabs if only one is open
  3. Proxy settings
To reverse the settings simply open the all.js files that are modified (modified files are listed when the scrip runs) and remove or comment out the last line in the file or copy the backup version over the modified file,