This is a shot in the dark question. The bean counters at my company decided to save some money and farm out the firewall/network to another company. There has always been an auto proxy server which I would plug into firefox->preference->advanced->network->settings->Automatic Proxy Configuration URL.

Last week it stopped working. Doesn't work on Ubuntu 14.04 firefox either however Chrome works on Ubuntu.

It *does* work on slackware 14.0 firefox.

It doesn't work on my Slackware 14.1 firefox, HOWEVER, it does work on Konqueror on 14.1! And I've checked multiple instances of slackware 14.0 and 14.1 on different machines - results the same.

I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with the IT guy. They can't figure out why its not working with the firewall on the firewall side.

Does this sound remotely familiar to anyone? Just hoping someone ran across this.

Can you access the web page for the url?

Should be something like http://www.contractorstakingourwork.com/proxy.pac or such.

In some distro's the global proxy.pac will work OK for most browsers but almost no other tools like software.

Might be sure to disable ipv6..


All that happened was they changed the url??

The problem turned out to be our proxy servers handling of NTLM. If I set the about:config switch, network.auth.force-generic-ntlm-v1 to true, it works. In Firefox version 37, they turned off the fallback from NTLMv2 to NTLMv1. So our proxy server is somehow only communicating NTLMv1. Forwarded this info to our IT people and they are now trying to fix it.