On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 12:24, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > 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 possibly no longer actively maintained, module will fail.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.
How about the list of CPAN mirrors that the user has configured? I don't know much about CPAN's internals but it doesn't seem a stretch that that would be available or easily available through its API. Even failing that, www.cpan.org seems wholly reasonable. If you want a site that categorically will not notice, google.com and kernel.org ... Paul
