How can I tell Splunk to use a HTTP_PROXY to phone home?

[mctester]

After upgrading Splunk to v4.1.1, I've noticed that the Splunk server now "phone's home" over the Internet for some reason. Because the splunk server is on a network that requires an HTTP proxy, we now see the following errors in the splunkd.log upon startup:

04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text="Traceback (most recent call last):..."  
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" File "/opt/splunk/etc/system/bin/appsmanager.py", line 114, in handle_POST..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" with closing(urllib2.urlopen(self._login, post_args, URLOPEN_TIMEOUT)) as f:..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" File "/opt/splunk/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 124, in urlopen..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" return _opener.open(url, data, timeout)..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" File "/opt/splunk/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 395, in open..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.270 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" response = meth(req, response)..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.271 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" File "/opt/splunk/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 508, in http_response..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.271 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" 'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)..."
04-28-2010 13:48:32.271 WARN DateParserVerbose - Failed to parse timestamp for event. Text=" File "/opt/splunk/lib/python2.6/urllib2.py", line 433, in error..."

So, here are my questions:

1) What is this Internet connectivity required for?
2) Is there any way to specify an HTTP_PROXY on Splunk so that it can successfully phone home?

[Simeon]

Splunk will try to connect home to verify versioning. You should disable this setting if you know that Splunk cannot reach splunk.com from it's location.

http://www.splunk.com/wiki/Community:ConfigureNoInternet

You should be able to use the http_proxy variable within python, although I have not verified this.

[pinoyoz]

Hi Simeon,

Where do you define this variable within python?

[dwaddle]

I don't know what this is used for, but just from scanning the stack trace I might know how to make it use an outbound proxy.

It is using Python urllib, which can use an environment variable 'http_proxy' to specify the proxy server. Before starting splunkd, try an 'export proxy_server=my.proxy.server:port'