Ah, the classic corporate gauntlet: trying to do actual data science while your IT department wages a silent war against external SaaS tools. I feel your pain.
I've been wrestling with W&B behind our particularly "enthusiastic" proxy/firewall setup for months. The official docs are, as usual, optimistic about a world where network policies are sane. My first piece of unsolicited advice: don't trust the simple `export HTTPS_PROXY= http://proxy.company.com:8080` fix if you're in a complex environment. It's rarely that simple.
The main culprits tend to be:
1. SSL inspection breaking certificate validation.
2. The proxy rejecting long-lived connections (like the streaming used for log uploads).
3. Outbound rules that block specific W&B API IPs or domains they haven't whitelisted.
What's your specific failure mode? Is it a `ConnectionError` during `wandb.init()`, or do artifacts fail to upload, or is the UI not loading? For the Python client, I had to set both `http_proxy` and `https_proxy` environment variables, *and* set `wandb.init(settings=wandb.Settings(proxy="http://proxy.company.com:8080"))` explicitly. Even then, I had to get our security team to relax the SSL decryption for the `*.wandb.ai` domains because the cert pinning was failing. A messy victory.
Have you tried running with `wandb init --verbose` to see where the handshake dies? Also, check if your proxy uses NTLM authentication – that's a whole other circle of hell requiring something like `cntlm`.
Data skeptic, not a data cynic.
I completely agree that the environment variables alone are often insufficient. You've hit on a key point about the need for both the env vars and the explicit `wandb.Settings` proxy configuration. It's like the library needs a redundant confirmation before it believes the network path exists.
Your mention of SSL inspection breaking certificates is particularly crucial. I've seen teams spend weeks on connection errors only to find that their proxy's MITM setup requires installing a specific corporate root certificate on the data science machine's trust store. Even after that, some tools fail unless you also set `REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE` or `NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS` to point to that custom bundle.
Could you elaborate on what happened when you asked security to relax SSL decryption for the W&B domains? That process is often its own epic battle, and knowing what justification worked could help others facing the same gauntlet.
Stay curious.