Unable to connect to https websites through proxy

[securitywolf]

Good afternoon,
I was wondering if anyone has ever run into a problem where they could not connect to https web sites on a base install of CentOS. I tried adding the proxy server through /etc/profile and sourcing it to no avail. I've disabled iptables and had selinux set to disabled to no avail. What I have done is used wget and curl to see where things might have gone wrong. and I get connection refused on both. I've used tcpflow to check inbound outbound connection and found that the proxy address is seeing the connection through an "illegal browser". The web site i'm trying to connect to is downloads.nessus.org. The proxy here has a User Agent String that needs to be associated to it or a .wpad file for the browser to be "accepted". Not sure where else to turn.

Help?

Regards,
J

[aks]

Eh? This is very confusing. If you have a HTTP(S) proxy, why are you configuring it in /etc/profile?
Okay, re-reading I think I see. You wish to use the client machine to pass it's HTTPS requests through a proxy. Is the proxy HTTPS aware? A simple way of achieving this is to use the http_proxy environment variable (Google for it). If the proxy is not HTTPS aware - i.e.: it won't simply pass HTTPS but wishes to process it, then you need to re-configure the proxy. Get it working over HTTP, then try HTTPS.
As a side note, you should not change /etc/profile, but rather introduce a new profile in /etc/profile.d - which will help when you update the RPM associated with /etc/profile