After a gloomy fortnight , which brought Google rejection and also the news that I won’t be allowed to sit in the campus to be held in December, things seem to have come back to track.
What man ek job nahin mila tu doosra mil jayega, kya load hain. And I am not going for apping right now. Peace hain.
But whats right?? Actually Kgp is a place where it seems to me that internet is the lifeline. To access this internet you are required to go through a proxy server. But when you don’t work on Windows at all then it becomes difficult to check the fastest proxy and change the firefox settings. Checking the proxy now and then and then actually changing the firefox settings requires a lot of clicks(read work). 
Solution1: Put up a proxy changer extension in firefox. But this requires you to manually check the fastest proxy running. Also since I have a small monitor, putting up the extension takes up an extra row in firefox which I certainly hate. Also installing an extension might increase thememory consumption of firefox, which already tops the charts. So extension is out of bounds.
Solution2: I found a Script on KLUG(Kharagpur Linux Users Group) which could query a list of proxies to find the fastest one. So I extended this script to also change the firefox proxy to the fastest one. Done!. But it had a problem. Firefox had to restart ever time the proxy was changed. This causes a lot of trouble, since if you are reading something the firefox has to restart.
Solution3: Some one on Mutter suggested to run a local proxy server, have a consistent local proxy in firefox and change the settings of the local server when ever the proxies change. Cool! So I set up squid and configured it to talk to the institute proxy servers. The proxy in my firefox corresponds to the local squid server, and a cron job regularly checks the fastest proxy changing the squid settings, if the fastest proxy has changed. Thus only the background squid server has to be restarted and the firefox remains static. And I am done.
All Hail to the Penguin!
Hello Udit,
Who hosts the mutter LAN address and how was it configured? I was thinking it was accessible from within KGP-LAN only. But i was wondered when i saw its opening from my office at Gurgaon too. Please explain in detail.