On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 10:39:17PM +0100, Alexander Clouter wrote: > David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > > You could always check whether outbound HTTP is allowed by connecting to > > somewhere entirely different. Try penthouse or thepiratebay - > > somewhere which is highly unlikely to have been explicitly whitelisted, > > so is a good test of whether Generic Web Stuff can be expected to work. > <network-monkey^Wsysadmin-hat> *winces* </network-monkey^Wsysadmin-hat> > I consider it 'unfriendly' to call on the resources of others for things > that do not benefit them and also if (for example) > penthouse/thepiratebay are down/unreachable (no such thing as "100% > Internet access")/depreated/expired/changed/filtered/etc then your, > possibly no longer actively maintained, module will fail.
I would consider the impact of trying to grab penthouse's robots.txt, especially when it would only be accessed when testing a perl module, to be so minimal as to be of no consequence. But feel free to grab http://cpxxxan.barnyard.co.uk/ instead if you'd prefer to hit a "willing victim"'s site. There is, of course, no 100% solution. Having the live tests skip if you can't connect to penthouse (or cpxxxan) is only a problem if penthouse (or cpxxxan) goes permanently off the air. -- David Cantrell | A machine for turning tea into grumpiness Planckton: n, the smallest possible living thing
