newbie problem, Microsoft Proxy Manager on Server

I am testing Knoppix to see if we might be able to gradually move from MS to Linxux :P. I am learning as I go and may ask a silly question.

Please bear with me ... I am not the IT person here, just a person who is not pleased with our present IT systems. We are likely to do an upgrade over the next year and I would prefer we had a choice.

Our company is quite conservative so I don't want to change too much in the network before I can show that Linux on the desktop will work for us. All http traffic runs through MS Proxy on our server (NT/Exchange).

Is there some way to bypass this MS Proxy to the internet? I would prefer not to get into a spat with our IT guy to change the network and put a router or to put me on a separate subnet.

I am also not able to mount our file server via smb. Knoppix says that some daemon/service isn't running. I can read all the files on c:\
Can someone enlighten me?

Thanks in advance

I am not an expert myself, but I do run a Linux system in a big company whose official desktop is Windows 2000. What I did was obtain the proxy server settings to access the internet through the firewall. What you can do is for the web is open Internet Explorer, then go to Tools, Internet Options, Connections, Lan Settings, then Proxy Server information. Write this information down then open Mozilla and go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Proxies, and type the information here. You can do the same with FTP if you need that program outside the firewall. Open WS_FTP, CuteFTP, FileZilla, etc. and obtain the proxy server settings from that program and then in Linux type the information into the program you want to use (Konqueror, gFTP, KBear, etc.).

As far as Samba/SMB is concerned, here at my company I have to ping the name of the server ("ping server.address.company.com", for example) to obtain the IP address of the server I want to connect to, then in Konqueror, type "smb://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/" where the xxxx's is the IP address of the server, it, that is, the server allows connections from outside the server's group, because you computer has probably not authenticated to the network.

I know it ain't much, but I hope it helps a little bit.

Thank you for your tips.

As I understand from speaking with our IT person, MS Proxy Manager need you to "log in" to the proxy.(?) This is unusual since every other proxy I have come across doesn't.

Are you running Microsoft Proxy Client? Or are you just going through a server proxy? i.e. http://server:80 in the IE Prefs;Connections;Network?

MS Proxy Manager and Proxy Client is weird. :evil:

Thanks again.

I just found this site which was discussed in another message in this forum.

http://apserver.sourceforge.net/

Now to figure out how to make it work.