So we were looking at a way of sending different users out different ‘interweb’ ‘pipes’ mainly so that our users YouTube traffic would stop interfering with our business traffic. So a guy in the group had what I think is an ingenious idea to use firefox with a hardcoded proxy server to point to a separate proxy server on a separate line. So if you need intranet access use IE (some intranet stuff only works on IE anyways) and if you want to do some timewasting, bandwidth sucking web surfing, use the FireFox. One quick way to deploy it is to xcopy deploy a preconfigured portable firefox I disabled the splash screen by using the FirefoxPortable.ini as explained here. I locked down firefox by going through these goofy instructions….

http://ilias.ca/blog/2005/03/locking-mozilla-firefox-settings/

To paraphrase,

Create a txt file that starts with a \\

Like this //
lockPref(“network.proxy.type”, 0);
lockPref(“browser.startup.homepage”, “http://ilias.ca/”);

Use a bit shifter with an offset of 13. You can get one here and save the file as mozilla.cfg into the same folder as firefox.exe (for portable firefox this is C:\FirefoxPortable\App\Firefox)

Now edit the all.js (FirefoxPortable\App\Firefox\greprefs

and on the very last line add (this tells it to load the config file)

pref(“general.config.filename”, “mozilla.cfg”);

There you go, you now have firefox portable with the proxy server address locked down. And in our case pointing to a proxy server meant just for ‘general surfing’.

For added points you can use OpenDns on the proxy to help lock it down.