Getting IE8 to work properly with proxy exceptions

[thesheep]

I'm using Parallels 5 on OSX 10.6.4 in an office environment, where I need to use a proxy server to access external URLs.

For this we have a proxy auto configuration script. I have a local copy of it on my hard drive so that I can add exceptions for my local development server.

In Windows, running on Parallels 5, I can set up Firefox so that it uses the proxy script, and everything works.

However, when I put the same script (file location) into the IE8 options, I get no access at all.

Becoming frustrated with this, I tried to sort of mimic the script using IE8's own proxy settings. So I set a proxy server for all services. Then tried to add a couple of exceptions for my local development server. Now I can access external websites, but my local dev server is still not accessible.

Anyone have any tips? Is this a problem specific to being on Parallels?

 

[thesheep]

Has anyone at all managed to get local proxy files working in Windows under Parallels?

Playing with it some more, the results just seem intermittent. It seems that file locations need to be entered into IE differently from Firefox ("file://c:/windows/proxy.pac" for IE but "file:///c:windows/proxy.pac" for FF). But although that helps me get the proxied URLs, I'm still not able to get the local exceptions working at the moment.