Eclipse Galileo and Helios won't update behind proxy

If you are trying to update Eclipse Galileo (3.5) and Helios (3.6) behind Proxy, you might run into problems like "Site is not found".

So, obvious course of action would be to check Proxy Configuration. Now, you change the settings and ensure that it has right authorization details.

Even after these steps, eclipse would fail to update and error message remains same.

It sounds baffling and it sure is.

After doing some googling for it, I found that Eclipse 3.5 onwards, FileTransferAPI has been changed. In ECF 3.0/Eclipse 3.5 the primary provider is based upon Apache httpclient 3.1. This was introduced in the ECF 3.0/Eclipse 3.5 cycle because the previous provider that was based upon the JRE URLConnection implementation proved insufficiently reliable (i.e. see bug 166179).

Unfortunately, the Apache httpclient implementation, although more robust than the URLConnection-based provider, does not support NTLMv2 proxies directly (for an explanation of why, see here).

For NTLMv2 Proxies, that require username and password for access the workaround is to

1. Disable the ECF httpclient provider.
2. Provide the NTLMv2 proxy authentication info (proxyhost, domain, username, and password)

In ECF 3.0/Galileo both can be done via system properties provided to Eclipse on startup. Here is an example using 'myproxy', 'mydomain', 'myusername', and 'mypassword':

Following settings can be put in eclipse.ini so that Eclipse does not use HTTPClient

-Dorg.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.excludeContributors=org.eclipse.ecf.provider.filetransfer.httpclient
-Dhttp.proxyPort=8080
-Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxy
-Dhttp.proxyUser=mydomain\myusername
-Dhttp.proxyPassword=mypassword
-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts=localhost|127.0.0.1


once you do this, you should be able to update Eclipse.

References:

1. ECF Filetransfer Support for NTLMv2 Proxy
2. Eclipse Bug about this problem