April 30, 2004

5:21 AM

I'm trying to get my application (VB, but that doesn't matter) to connect to the internet and support proxy servers that require a username and password. The former is easy, the latter not. What I'm doing is sending Proxy-Authorization: Basic [authentication] in the header (where [authentication] is "username:password" base64 encoded) with each request. However the proxy server keeps reporting error 407 (authentication required). I've read the RFC's, I've read google groups but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Any ideas?
posted by ralawrence to (2 comments total)

If it's going through a Microsoft proxy, then you have to use NTLM to encode your information. I'm not a programmer, but there are many many sources around the web discussing this. Samba, uses it. Mozilla finally implemented it. Just search Google on NTLM and you'll find out more.
posted by mkelley at 6:30 AM on April 30, 2004

by my reading of the rfc, you may need to repeat the request with the auth header in response to the 407.
posted by andrew cooke at 6:34 AM on April 30, 2004