IE is really, really dumb
In an effort to further convince Internet Explorer to use our WPAD proxy autoconfiguration settings, I added the proper option to our DHCP settings.
option wpad code 252 = text;
option wpad "http://www.example.com/wpad.dat";
IE for some reason is a big dummy head and chops off the last character of the URL. I’ve been seeing quite a few lines like this in the webserver logs on our registration server.
10.242.7.194 - - [19/Sep/2004:13:53:54 -0700] "GET /wpad.da HTTP/1.1" 302 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)"
So by putting a newline at the end, you can trick IE into obeying a standard…
option wpad "http://www.example.com/wpad.dat\n";
Thanks to the Squid Faq for clueing me into that.