smart proxy not working correctly?

[Grant McWilliams]

I have a situation where there are a lot of mobile machines that roam inside
and outside of a network. When they're inside the network they need to
connect to an http/ftp proxy in order to access the outside. Setting this is
easy in smart (smart config --set http-proxy=
http://proxy.example-company.com:8080). The problem is sometimes these
machines are on the outside of the network and the proxy isn't available to
them (proxy.example-company.com is a DNS name only available inside the
network).

I was hoping (wishful) that if smart couldn't contact the proxy server it
would attempt the action without the proxy. What would be the problem with
this, it would just error out twice right?

To test this theory I changed the proxy settings like this

smart config --set ftp-proxy=ftp://proxy.example-company:8080
> smart config --set http-proxy=http://proxy.example-company:8080
>

As well as this to cover my bases

 smart config --set ftp-proxy=http://proxy.example-company:8080
>  smart config --set ftp-proxy=proxy.example-company:8080
>  smart config --set http-proxy=proxy.example-company:8080
>

The following syntax seems to work -> smart config --set http-proxy=
http://proxy.example-company:8080.
If I do this smart can't download or update the repo if the proxy server is
not available even if the machine is on the public network and the repo
could be accessed directly. I believe this to be the intended behavior.

If I set the ftp-proxy setting in the same manner I can still download
and/or update any repo list as if the proxy
setting wasn't even there. I've tried all of the above settings for
ftp-proxy and they all work when I'm outside the network and the proxy
server can't be reached.

So is this a problem with Smart not actually setting the proxy or is it just
ignoring the proxy setting if the proxy isn't available?

I asked the Windows admin about the proxy settings and he said (in total
Windows fashion) that the proxies only work with Internet Explorer and not
the command line (cough sputter!). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Grant
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