Update-Help on a Server-core behind a proxy

Question

I'm struggling to update the help on a server-core box behind a proxy.

I have seen that it was possible to set winhttp proxy with netsh to solve the problem, but powershell update-help clearly don't use winhttp proxy, tested it on my desktop and it just use the proxy set-up in ie.

Problem : there is no ie in server core servers, so... I tried to set registry values like this :

set-itemproperty 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings' -name ProxyEnable -value 1
Set-ItemProperty 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings' -Name ProxyServer -Value '192.168.0.X:3128'

but it still doesn't work, server-core box bypass the proxy and frames get dropped by the firewall. Any idea how to make this work ? (without using save-help from an other host)

Answer 1

Same problem and stumbled on this workaround

http://blog.stangroome.com/2013/08/02/powershell-update-help-and-an-authenticating-proxy/

[edit to add detail]

Our proxy is NTLM authenticated. From the article I used these two lines;

$wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$wc.Proxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials

Then test with this...

$wc.DownloadString('http://microsoft.com')

Then adding the first two lines to my profile.ps1 and restarted powershell and the update-help command worked, as well as most of the other web requests I execute.

Answer 2

As far as I know, updateable help does not support computers behind a proxy. Its a glaring bug, no doubt.

There are scripts out there that get around this by finding each module's helpURI, downloads the package (using a regular webclient object) and then runs update-help specifying the already downloaded help file.

I have a few colleagues that have used this (use google translate if you don't know german), but I do not know whether it will work on server core or not. Still, I guess its worth a try:

Blog post: Save-Help im Unternehmen für Offline Rechner auch mit einem Proxy benutzen

Answer 3

We don't have an authenticating proxy but I had a similar problem with update-help. It seems our gateway may be set up not to allow requests from powershell, but does allow requests from IE. In our case running fiddler allowed the request from powershell to get through the gateway\proxy. Not sure how, maybe fiddler changes the user-agent string or something, but might be worth a pop if your network is set up similarly.

BTW if anyone from Microsoft is monitoring, please can you at least make the update-help -verbose option report the URLs it is trying to request as this made troubleshooting impossible. I was using fiddler to try to work out what URLs powershell was trying to request.