manu's blog

Hackers and Sysadmins :-) Google has recently released " pactester ", a tool to test proxy auto-configuration (PAC) files. Use of PAC files is becoming more and more common because of automation and ease of administration provided by them. Before pactester there was no "real" way to test the PAC files. We could tell whether this site will be accessible using this PAC file or not. But, we could not tell which proxy server will be used for a specific URL unless we examine the traffic using some network sniffer or check the access logs at the proxy server. Both of these ways were not very accessible and were time consuming. Of course, another way to test would be the manual inspection of PAC files, but again it's error prone and quite impractical for large and complex PAC files. Pactester resolves all these issues by simulating the browser behavior. It evaluates the PAC file in a JavaScript context and returns the proxy server for a specific URL using the PAC file