Recently I´ve implemented eTrust SCM in my company, to act as a Spamfilter and Webproxy. After the setup (which was a real pain) I wasn´t shure how I could redirect all my clients to use SCM. I could serve a nice GPO to my IE-Users, but what about all those Firefox/Chrome/Opera installations?

One of my friends, who works at a well known firewall company in Innsbruck, pointed me to WPAD and PAC. After studying the very good articles on Wikipedia (WPAD and PAC) I started to reflect the mentioned changes to my network. Everything went fine, until I got to the point where I had to add a host called “wpad” to my Windows 2003 DNS. It just didn´t resolve! Testing some other hostnames I added afterwards, everything went fine. Just my wpad-host wouldn´t resolve.

Doing some research I stumbled across this article on Technet. The described method is to be used on Windows 2008, but also works on 2003. Strange enough I couldn´t find any articles about 2003, but enough on 2008. Go figure.

After applying the changes and starting a new instance of my Firefox (and, meanwhile, examining the live logs of SCM) I figured out it works.

So I could configure all my clients without going too many ways. Read ahead on my followup (which will be released soon) on how to achive this.