Proxy Web Servers and Authentication > Local PC Setup

Automatic Detection

• In Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows, Microsoft introduced "Web Proxy Auto-Detect" (WPAD)
• To set up
  1. Create a DNS entry (either an "A" record or a "CNAME" record) for "wpad.college.edu" which points to a web server.
  2. On that web server, create a file called "wpad.dat" on the root level that contains the Proxy Autoconfig script.
  3. Set browsers to "Automatically detect settings" in the proxy setup screen.
• On startup, the browser will attempt to fetch http://wpad.college.edu/wpad.dat to learn settings
• Submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for consideration as an RFC