Fiddler vs. ISA-Server

2011-11-17

I recently looked into Ruby on Rails to see what the hype is or rather was about. I even found a niffty introduction to the subject and found along the way the nifty little language ruby. I probably will not use it for any serious projects, but it is nice to know I have a new tool in my tool belt.

I wanted to show a coworker my new found knowlage about this niffty language, but when trying to use gem I was locked out. I was quite aquinted with installing gems directly by downloading them and invoking gem locally, because of my previous jekyll experiance, but there should be a better way.

At work we are a almost pure Microsoft shop and thus use a ISA-Server as proxy. The ISA-Server has the unique feature that you authenticate with your system user account. Although this single logon feature is quite usefull, it is like so many things from Microsoft a non standard implementation. In theory the server supports other standard authentication mechanisms, but these are disabled in this instalation.

I looked online and found people using fiddler to go through the ISA server. Fiddler is actually a HTTP debugging tool and works as a open proxy, but it implements the authentication required for the ISA server. And what do you know; it worked like a charm. Just fire up fiddler, use the proxy on your machine and now you get through the ISA server. The great thing is that now I know a way to get other tools to work, like git (for HTTP hosted repositories).