Injecting proxy configuration into remote-viewer (RHEV/oVirt console)

One of the things that bother me is that I have not been able to find an easy way to change proxy settings when using the remote-viewer tool to connect to RHEV/oVirt virtual machines.

Finally I managed to put some thought into how to handle this situation -- and the easiest way I found is just to puto a wrapper into remote-viewer so whenver it's invoked via the browser, it can do all required mangling of the *.vv file we just downloaded.

The virt-viwer *.vv files are just INI files so updating them is usually quite easy via :

All in all, my wrapper looks like this :

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#!/bin/bash

# Wrapper around remote-viewer to inject proxy parameters.
# Needs ansible, but can be trivially amended to use crudini.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

path=$1
chmod 600 $path

logger $0 $path


# Add your magic about detecting whether we need to use a proxy in the 'if' below ;-)
if [ $(netstat -putan 2> /dev/null | grep -P ':3128.*LISTEN' -c) -ne 0 ]; then
    logger $0 enabling proxy
    ansible -m ini_file localhost -a "state=present section=virt-viewer option=proxy value=\"http://localhost:3128\" path=\"$path\""
    ansible -m ini_file localhost -a "state=present section=ovirt       option=proxy value=\"http://localhost:3128\" path=\"$path\""
    sed -i 's# = #=#g' $path
fi

#logger < $path
/usr/bin/remote-viewer $path

exit $?

And then you just need to instruct your browser to launch remote-viewer.sh rather than remote-viewer to have your proxy settings automatically added.

Happy hacking!