Pulse and proxy.pac with IE11

[Filbert]

I found this KB https://kb.pulsesecure.net/articles/Pulse_Secure_Article/KB28589

It says that a solution is provided for Network Connect and one is being investigated for the Pulse client but that was over a year ago. Does anyone know if this was fixed for the Pulse client and if so, in which version?

Thanks

[jbeakley]

Yes, I believe this has been fixed. There were several tickets filed relating to this behavior, including:

PRS-303538 - Pulse will not use Server side proxy when resource accessed from IE11 after tunnel established due to changes in IE11 application - works if resource accessed from FF

PRS-310334 - Pulse 5.0R3 doesn't restore proxy settings during normal windows shutdown

To get both of these fixes, you'd need to move to 5.1r4 or later. To get just the first fix, you'd need 5.0r8 or 5.1r1 (or later).

But to be safe, I recommend upgrading to the latest version of the Pulse Secure desktop client 5.1 (should be 5.1r6 as of this writing). Let us know if you upgrade and still have issues.

[Filbert]

Thanks. I found out that the users are not actually using IE 11, but using IE9. Their proxy settings are getting set to http://127.0.0.1ort/proxy.pac. Is this the right behavior when using IE 9 and Pulse 5.1R5?
I see this (PRS-327308) in the release notes that indicates that's an actual bug that was fixed. Can you provide the details of this PRS?

[jbeakley]

Filbert,

In short, yes, what you are seeing is expected.

Originally, Pulse used a file-based proxy, but then we noticed that file-based proxy no longer worked with IE 11. As a result, we changed Pulse to use an http-based proxy with IE 11 only. Later (after that fix was released), we realized that there were cases in which earlier versions of IE (including 10 and 9) also did not work with file-based proxies, so we extended the http proxies for earlier versions of IE.

So, I believe that what you are seeing is correct. Let me know if this doesn't make sense.