In this post I’ll pass on the methods I found to get PHP and your Linux boxes talking out through a corporate ISA proxy server. You can then bring in RSS feeds, updates and other things in WordPress and use apt-get to update Ubuntu.

cntlm

To start with we need to install cntlm on a Linux box (I’ll mention Ubuntu here but any flavour should work with a couple of tweaks). cntlm is “an NTLM / NTLM Session Response / NTLMv2 authenticating HTTP proxy“. Basically your non-Windows machines and apps can now talk to cntlm which will then talk to the ISA proxy in your organisation. So you stay within your corporate infrastructure and keep the security guys happy.

Download the deb installation package to your Ubuntu machine and install it with,

sudo dpkg -i cntlm_0.35.1-1_i386.deb

Open the config file for cntlm and edit it to add in your ISA proxy information and a valid user, domain and password that has web access with download rights. Further down the settings make sure gateway is enabled and you set suitable restrictions on the IP ranges that can use cntlm.

sudo nano /etc/cntlm.conf

Restart cntlm to make sure it gets the new settings,

sudo /etc/init.d/cntlm restart

Test your cntlm configuration by attempting to get to an external website,

sudo cntlm -M http://www.google.com -u your_user@your_domain -p your_password your_isa_proxy:port

apt-get

Configure apt-get to use the new proxy by editing the apt-get config,

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf

and add this line pointing to your cntlm proxy gateway. Change the IP and port if you’ve installed cntlm on another machine or different port.

Acquire::http::proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3128";

WordPress

Add these extra lines to the wp-config.php file in your WordPress directory. This works from version 2.8 onward and means you can keep your install and plugins up to date and secure. Again, make sure you change the IP and port to that of your cntlm proxy gateway. You may be able to comment out the username and password if things don’t work as expected. It’ll depend on your cntlm configuration.

define('WP_PROXY_HOST', '127.0.0.1');
define('WP_PROXY_PORT', '3128');
define('WP_PROXY_USERNAME', 'my_user_name');
define('WP_PROXY_PASSWORD', 'my_password');
define('WP_PROXY_BYPASS_HOSTS', 'localhost, www.example.com');

With any luck you now have a Linux machine and WordPress install that can easily be kept up to date inside your corporate environment.

After moving the small amount of static WekaDesign content into Pages, I copied a couple of files (index.php and .htaccess) from my WordPress folder (./blog) into the site root, changed the settings in WordPress (Settings»General»Blog Address) and viola, anyone going to www.wekadesign.co.nz, now hits WordPress. Good. Step one done.

Now to change the default landing page to be a static Page rather than the blog. Just as easy, visit Settings»Reading in WordPress and change the Front Page Displays option to be your Page. Excellent, now everyone lands at the the WordPress version of my static content. But how do you now send people to your old default blog page? You can use http://www.yoursite.co.nz/2009/ to target certain groups of content by date or category if you have Permalinks setup, but I couldn’t find the way that WP builds the default blog page.

It’s not obvious, but that 2nd option in Settings»Reading holds the key. The Posts Page option is asking you to select an existing WP Page that will act as a placeholder and be that default blog page. So, if you haven’t already, create a new Page with a suitable name. The name is important as that’s the URL everyone will use and see for your blog. So if you call the Page “peanut butter”, your blog page will now be http://www.yoursite.co.nz/peanut-butter/. It doesn’t matter what the content of the Page holds as no one will ever see it.

There is a slight “gotcha” with the Page names, in that any name being reused will work, but WP will append it with an incrementing number e.g. “peanut-butter-2″.

To finish off, just create a nice link on your site somewhere like the Sidebar to your default blog page.