Archiva requires DNS lookup on URLs for remote repositories, even with http proxy

Archiva seems to require to be able to perform DNS lookups on remote repositories even if a http proxy is defined - which is unfortunate in restricted network setups. MavenProxy handles this well, leaving Archiva 1.1 out as an alternative to migrate from in such environments.

At work we use MavenProxy, and that works quite ok - but we have had a wish to migrate to Archiva for better administration GUI etc. Tested the 1.1-release yesterday and setup was easy, but connects to remote repositories failed for some reason when Archiva tried to retrieve artifacts. Our server uses an http (network) proxy, which was specified in Archiva. Tried all sorts of things, and in the end I installed Ethereal and sniffed the network card to find out what was going on. Ethereal indicated that no http traffic was performed by Archiva towards any server. If I understand the Ethereal output correctly, Archiva performs a DNS lookup on remote addresses (e.g. on download.java.net or repo1.maven.org) prior to any http traffic. As the DNS lookup is rejected by the (internal) DNS used by the server (it has access to a limited DNS for security reasons etc), the rejection fails the communication with the remote repository.

Is it necessary for Archiva to perform DNS lookup on addresses which will be proxied by an http network proxy? Perhaps I am a bit confused there, but if a network proxy is specified - could it not also leave the DNS lookup to the network proxy for the external addresses? It seems quite unnecessary for Archiva to perform it in that scenario, and this may make Archiva unsuitable to some network setups/environments (like ours). MavenProxy does not perform any DNS lookup on the remote repository when a proxy is defined (checked with ethereal) - it just fires away the http request to the network proxy defined and leaves it up to that to perform further lookups.

I may be wrong here, so this issue should probably be verified by someone - but it should be quite easy to test. (Install Archiva, specify http proxy, install and start a network sniffer/ethereal, run a request for an artifact in a remote repository and verify that archiva performs a DNS lookup prior to any http requests to the proxy).

Solving this would make it easier for environments with restricted network setups and http proxies like us to migrate from mavenproxy to archiva. Perhaps this is already fixed in the fixes for 1.1.1 by Brett? As a temporary workaround for affected environment it would perhaps be possible to add hosts-file entries with ips of all the remote repositories etc. on Windows to make Archiva work, but...