At the office we have a weird Windows 2003 install running the ISA Firewall/Proxy which sits between us and the outside world, for some as yet unknown reason we get brown “Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed” error messages occasionally when visiting websites (like the example on the right.). I haven’t been able yet to find the cause, but it gets frustrating when some sites are inaccessible for no reason.

In order to get trouble free internet I installed a linux machine with a squid proxy, now the problem is that I don’t always want to use the squid proxy as it comes with its own internal network issues on our network.

After a bit of research I found that Google Chrome can be made to use a defined proxy by supplying a command line option. I created a new shortcut for Chrome and set the target too:

“C:\Users\Dale Nunns\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –proxy-server=192.168.0.20:3128

That makes it use my squid proxy (192.168.0.20:3128) when ever its started from that shortcut. Another nice option that I stumbled across awhile ago is to add “-incognito” to the end to start the browser in incognito mode.