Easily build BI Server from behind an NTLM proxy

Pentaho projects bases on Apache IVY to manage project's dependencies. This is good because it gives you a consistent and uniform way to manage projects dependencies but gives you some troubles if you need to make a build of one of the many Pentaho projects from behind an NTLM firewall.

So here it is a brief and concise survival guide about how to do that quickly and efficiently.

Install a local proxy in you development computer

First of all download cntlm a local proxy that let you easily authenticate through your company or customer NTLM authentication proxy. You've versions for Windows and Linux. I learned about it two years ago when I was on Linux and I had to manage some Maven projects. Now I'm on Windows and the good for me is that it has a version also for this platform (I tried using also ntlmaps but I wasn't able to have it working properly with IVY)

Installation is really simple but, on WIndows, has a tweak we will talk about later. Download the .zip from sourceforge and unzip it wherever is fine for you. Execute the setup.bat and it will rapidly install the local proxy as a Windows Service.

Go to the installation directory (typically C:\Program Files\cntlm) and edit cntlm.ini. Replace the informations for username, password, domain and your proxies hosts and ports as detailed in the file excerpt given below

#
# Cntlm Authentication Proxy Configuration
#
# NOTE: all values are parsed literally, do NOT escape spaces,
# do not quote. Use 0600 perms if you use plaintext password.
#

Username        <your_username>
Domain          <your_domain>
Password        <your_password>   # Use hashes instead (-H)
#Workstation    netbios_hostname        # Should be auto-guessed

Proxy           <1st_proxy_host>:<1st_proxy_port>
Proxy           <2nd_proxy_host>:<2nd_proxy_port>

#
# This is the port number where Cntlm will listen
#
Listen                3128

Make the changes and save the file. Now, before starting the local proxy service, here is the tweak. In my case, the setup.bat script forget to set a service startup parameter that sets the cntlm configuration parameter file location. So to workaround that, open your registry and go to the following key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\cntlm\Parameters. Look for the AppArgs attribute and modify it adding the parameter -i "C:\Program Files\Cntlm\cntlm.ini" as shown below

After that you're ready to start you service successfully otherwise you'll get an error.

Back to our Pentaho's project build

In my case I was making a build of the newest bi-server 3.6 get from the related branch of Pentaho repository (http://source.pentaho.org/svnroot/bi-platform-v2/branches/3.6). To enable IVY to use your locally configured authentication proxy server you've to set the following environment variable before starting compiling the project

ANT_OPTS=-Dhttp.proxyHost=localhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128

It is up to you to decide where to set that variable either as a Windows environment variable or from within a command line session (if you're starting the build manually).

And what about for the Linux users....

If you're on Linux you can install cntlm using the package manager of your favorite distro. I used it on Ubuntu and Fedora withou any problem. The configuration file is the same as before but is located in /etc/cntlm.conf. You've to change the same parameters detailed above for cntlm.ini (the file is exactly the same). Start the daemon, set the ANT_OPTS environment variable and have fun with your build.