PAC File Creation

Question

I am having to write a PAC file for an iPad deployment. The idea is that all normal web traffic goes though a proxy (172....) while the ipad's will go directly to an internal ipad server to be enrolled into profile manager, etc (and bpassing the proxy). The iPad server is not my gateway server, I have a windows server that handles dhcp and all other stuff. If I go directly to the ipadserver.local/mydevices in safari on an ipad I get 'page cannot be displayed, DNS Fail'
This is what I've written based upon pac file guides that I have Googled.
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)  {
          if (localHostOrDomainIsHost(host, “ipadserver.local”))
                        return “DIRECT”;
          return “PROXY 172.etc:80”;
Have I wriiten this code correctly???

Answer 1

I am not an expert on writing PAC files but a quick scan suggests it looks ok. However I did spot that you are using a .local domain.
If this means you are using .local as your internal domain name including for Active Directory then this is normally strongly discouraged at least from an Apple point of view. This is becuse Apple use the .local domain for MDNS (Multicast DNS) aka. Bonjour for automatic discovery of services. This tends to conflict horribly with trying to use the same domain for other purposes.
As a test try in Safari on the iPad accessing the server via its IP address, if it loads the page properly then this might support the theory that your use of .local is the problem.
Other things to try are manually defining the proxy server on the iPad, trying to access an external website from the iPad e.g. google.com you also want to try something to test that hostnames are being successfully resolved via a DNS server www.google.com would be one example but if you have internally a server that is not in the .local domain that would be another.
The error suggests it is not being blocked by a firewall or the proxy server but is failing to resolve via DNS. Of course a remote possibility exists that DNS lookups are being blocked by a firewall which is why I am suggesting the need to do DNS lookup tests. A DNS lookup problem for the .local domain being that it could be conflicting is more likely.