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Running DataWarrior 5.5.0 behind a Firewall/Proxy [message #1395]

Thu, 09 September 2021 10:24

haberhauer
Messages: 1
Registered: September 2021

Junior Member

Hi all,

This is not a bug report or a question but a description about how to to deal with proxies/firewall servers in your environment so that Datawarrior could access external databases.

Basically we observed two problems in our environment.
a) We need to provide the proxies to Datawarrior
b) Because Datawarrior uses also https protocol to communicate with external servers we need to add the CA certificates of our organization to the keystore of the used JRE.

For a) we modified the Variable JAVA_FLAGS set in the datawarrior startup script as follows:

JAVA_FLAGS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=<proxy-server> -Dhttp.proxyPort=<proxy-port> -Dhttps.proxyHost=<proxy-server> -Dhttps.proxyPort=<proxy-port> ${DWPROXYS_USER}"

if http_proxy and https_proxy environment are already set you might also try:

JAVA_FLAGS="-Djava.net.useSystemproxies=true"

But I had not tested this.

In our case we also need to provide user credentials because our proxy requires authentication. But be aware that when doing so user and password could be seen in clear text when doing "ps -ef" on the lunix system. So this might not comply with your security guidelines!!!

So if required each user need to set the above used $DWPROXYS_USER like:

export DWSPROXYS_USER="-Dhttps.proxyUser=<username> -Dhttps.proxyPassword=<password> -Dhttp.proxyUser=<username> -Dhttp.proxyPassword=<password>"

But again be aware of the security implications!!

For b)
Datawarrior is using it's own Java Runtime Environment which uses it's own keystore for dealing with https connections. Since communication is parsing our proxies we need to add our internal CA certificates to the keystore otherwise you will get some errors about the certificate chain.
Todo so you need your internal CA certificates if you don't know how to get them ask your internal IT representative for support.
To add to certificates use the keytool provided in the JRE of DataWarrior

${DWJAR}/jre/bin/keytool -import -file <My_certificate-file> -alias <My certificat Name> -keystore 
"${DWJAR}\jre\lib\security\cacerts" -storepass "changeit"

Finaly please check in the "$DWJAR/datawarrior" startup script the JAVA_FLAGS is used it should look like this:

${DWJAR}/jre/bin/java -Xms512m -Xmx4096m -splash:"$DWJAR/loadin.png" -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 ${JAVA_FLAGS} -cp "$DWJAR/*" com.actelion.research.datawarrior.DataWarriorLinux $*

This should do the job!

I hope this helps someone struggeling with proxies!

Best,

Gregor

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