When a Proxy is missing add a hint and a link to an article how to fix this

One of the more frequent questions on the KNIME Forum is the one where someone is not able to install KNIME extensions due to missing proxies.

Could it be that when a specific error is being reprted like not being able to access the repository to add suggestions and links to articles like how to install extensions or how to set up proxies.

Also a general link to the FAQ might be an idea.

Dear @mlauber71,

I agree, proxy error messages sometimes don’t make it immediately obvious how to resolve the issue. However, not in all cases it is possible to tell that the proxy setup is the cause of the error. For example, when a proxy is “missing” (I interpret this as not configuring a required proxy) and the requested address cannot be found, this is case is indistinguishable from a mistyped, thus non-existing, address.

We can, however, tell when…

  • disabled authentication schemes (see this FAQ) are the issue. In this case, you should already be seeing a message, similar to this one. If you are not, please report your case.

    … an authentication scheme for proxies is currently disabled. To enable it, see our FAQ: https://www.knime.com/faq#q42

    We know of some connector and authenticator nodes which do not show this message yet, but we are working on it (ticket AP-20781).

  • proxy authentication is the issue, since the AP receives the HTTP response “407 Proxy Authentication Required”, and proxy authentication can be found in our documentation as well. Nonetheless, there are many corners in the AP where we do not point to this documentation yet. For this issue, I created the ticket AP-23491.

In installation errors from Python-based extensions, you should already see a link to this documentation where the proxy setup is mentioned as well. Additionally, with AP 5.4, we should get rid of many Python-based installation errors in the first place, as we won’t rely on the communication between AP and Conda/PyPI anymore.

If you have examples of specific errors which do not fall under the above-mentioned cases, please let us know.

Best, Leon

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