Users may be unable to connect to Live Share services via a proxy

[jasongin]

Users who are on a network that requires use of a proxy server to connect to external websites may experience problems using Live Share. Specifically, attempting to share using a connection mode of Auto (the default mode) or Relay may fail to connect to the relay service.

A partial workaround may be to use Direct connection mode, however then guests must be on the same network as you in order to join the session. (Direct connections may also work through a VPN, depending on the VPN client and server configuration.)

Please upvote and/or comment on this issue if you're experiencing proxy-related issues.

[binaryn3xus]

Just for anyone else working on this issue. The problem that I experiences with this issue went all the way down to only working on the same LAN connection. VPN over a WAN connection or anything like that would not work for me through our company proxy.

[Chuxel]

Note we added a section on troubleshooting connections based on our experiences here to the docs to try to help people out. https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/live-share/blob/master/docs/getting-started.md#troubleshooting-connections

[jasongin]

@Chuxel that looks great! The "getting started" page is getting really long though. Do you think it would make sense to move the sections about connection mode, connection troubleshooting, and firewall settings to a separate page, linked from the getting started page?

[Chuxel]

@jasongin Yeah I was thinking about that as well. There's also the quick start articles that cut to the chase so this is the more detailed article with things like manual join in it so we'll have to figure out the right balance for this one.

[Chuxel]

@jasongin We also had a user on Slack mention that we are not respecting the VS Code proxy settings. My assumption is we'll track this problem with this same GitHub issue.

[kdruff-c1]

Our proxy essentially serves as a MITM and I'm seeing this issue when trying to sign-in:

fetch('https://insiders.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstudio.com/').then(res => res.json()).then(console.log);

The promise is rejected and my fetch fails:

GET https://insiders.liveshare.vsengsaas.visualstudio.com/ net::ERR_INSECURE_RESPONSE

[Chuxel]

@kdruff-c1 It looks like this is indeed a specific issue with proxies that we've now identified. We've got an internal thread going to see what we can do about it in the service. Thank you so much for reporting it!

[Chuxel]

The intermediate SSL cert issue (#111) that was at least partially responsible for causing this issue should be resolved at this point. @kdruff-c1 - Can you retry to see if it resolves your problem? @JoshuaGarrison27 - I'd be curious if your issue is resolved as well. We're still working on full proxy support.

[Chuxel]

@jasongin FYI - Joshua and I connected and he's still seeing the problem so we'll leave this issue open for the larger proxy problem.

[binaryn3xus]

Just for logging purposes, I worked with Chuck (@Chuxel ) to see if this was resolved for me. It looks like I will have to wait for full proxy support. Thanks for keeping me in the loop!

Edit: Should have refreshed my browser before posting this. haha. Thanks everyone.