Pidgin's proxy unfriendly flight

And there I was thinking it was my proxy service on the blink since I haven't paid my bill for months. Turns out the latest Pidgin update is decidedly proxy unfriendly:

Pidgin 2.6.4 Changes Proxy Behavior Filed under: Miscellaneous, Tools — Julian @ 10:11 pm I use Pidgin for all of my IM functions including Facebook and Skype and I love the application. I especially like the OTR plug-in that allows me to have “private” conversations with my buddies regardless of the underlying protocol being used. I also use the Portable Apps version so that I can “take” my contacts, history, and other settings with me. I recently updated to the 2.6.4 version and after the update completed and I started Pidgin, I was unable to connect to any of my accounts. I use a remote HTTP proxy server to relay my IM connection so that restrictive corporate firewalls don’t block my IM accounts. I opened the debug window and after seeing the “Access Denied” message, I thought that it might be the proxy server itself. After verifying that nothing in the server configuration has changed recently, I started to look at other possibilities. I was able to configure Firefox to use the proxy server successfully, so I started to look at the Pidgin client as the culprit… I did a quick Google search and I found the reason. In the change-log for version 2.6.4 is a line in the libpurple component:

* Don’t send Proxy-Authorization headers to HTTP proxy servers until we’ve received a "407 Proxy Authentication Required" response from the server. (thecrux)

For some reason, the Squid Proxy Server that I use does not send this 407 response back and Pidgin never sends the credentials. So of course the Proxy Server replies with Access Denied since it does not allow unauthenticated users to use it. I’m sure that the developers fix the problem for a good reason, but it is still frustrating that existing working behavior in one version stops working in the next version. Until I can upgrade the Squid server or figure out how to make it send the 407 response, I’ll stay at version 2.6.3…

Thank you Julian, I would never have figured this out if it were not for your enlightening posting on the problem

https://julianscorner.com/