10.7: Get the Lion installer to work behind a proxy server

Apr 06, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: jgc

When re-installing Lion from the Recovery Partition, the installer needs to check installation eligibility with Apple's servers. If your computer needs to access the Internet through a proxy server for whatever reason, the installer won't pick up on this; it will attempt to make a direct connection, fail, and tell you to contact AppleCare. You can use the networksetup command in Terminal to get around this.

First, access Terminal from within the Installer's Utilities menu.

The networksetup command can configure a vast array of network options, a full list of which you can see by typing networksetup --help. The two options we're concerned with for this purpose are -setwebproxy and -setsecurewebproxy. You need to enter a service name with each command: in most cases this will be Ethernet for wired connections, and Wi-Fi for wireless ones.

So putting this all together, to tell the Installer to connect using the proxy server proxy.example.com via Wi-Fi on port 8080, we would type:

networksetup -setwebproxy Wi-Fi proxy.example.com 8080
networksetup -setsecurewebproxy Wi-Fi proxy.example.com 8080


Substitute your own values, of course. Quit Terminal, go through the Installer steps again and you should be good to go.

[kirkmc adds: I haven't tested this.]

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