changing/simulating ip adresses

[eluser]Berik[/eluser]
Hi there,

A client asked me a very strange thing for his sister's website and I really have no idea how to get it to work.

Basically the website is located in France and my client wants me to write a script that would simulate 8-10 connections to the website from different parts of the world. The catch being that these connections do not exist and must look like they are real connections.

I've been rambling around the web to find a solution to this and just can't find it. From what I understand it looks like I need to either do some IP spoofing, set up some kind of proxy or find a way to send some http headers modifying the ip datagram somehow.

If anyone has a clue about how to get around to a practical solution I'd greatly appreciate your help.

[eluser]mddd[/eluser]
What is the point of simulating those connections? Is it to see if the site can handle a certain amount of simultaneous connections? Is it to check if the site can correctly identify where a user is coming from? Depending on the purpose, there will be different solutions.

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
The easiest and most realistic way to do this would be through proxy connections. You could do this with firefox plugins (i use foxy proxy) or using ssh port forwarding.
IP spoofing would not work because you wouldn't be able to get the data being sent back to you from the website(as it's going to the spoofed IP).

If it's latency that your client wants to be tested, then you could simply ping a few known IP address in different parts of the world, take note of the response time. and then write a script that sleeps for that many milliseconds before sending each packet.

Let me know in a reply to this if you succeed in this. I'd be interested to know your methods.

[eluser]WanWizard[/eluser]
A lot easier is to set up a router in your local network (i.e. local to the internet facing interface of the webserver), add an extra segment, interface or VLAN to that router, and assign that interface a subnet from across the globe.

Connect your PC to that subnet, give it an IP in that range, and start testing. The webserver will see the IP you want to test (it doesn't know that you're not on the internet), the router will route the return traffic back to you test PC because you're locally connected (no route needed).

If you want to test latency, get a linux box and NetEm, which can add latency, packet corruption, reordering and more nasty stuff to your connection.

edit: you could also do this with a linux machine, two interfaces, and a virtual machine, if network stuff scares you...

[eluser]Berik[/eluser]
Hey guys thanks for your input

I think I didn't word correctly my query to you as it's not about testing latency or number of connections. It's more of a "get me out of a family feud" type of situation and I would like to help but just don't know how.

My client put up a site for his sister and for some obscure reason he told her that it would also get some traffic from different parts of the world and not only from France. After a few months of being online it appears that it does not and that is the reason of the dispute. He wants peace of mind and therefore asked me to put up a script that would make it look like some connections came from different countries. We're not talking about a huge amount of connections, but only 8-10 daily connections.

I was thinking of a script that would pick a random IP from a list of predefined IPs and connect to her website using that IP so it shows up in her stats. Then a cronjob would use that script at random times during the day to do the work automagically

My problem here is to be sure that the connection being logged in the stats is from the IP the script pulled out so she doesn't realise that it's actually a fake connection. Otherwise the family feud will just rise up one notch...

I know it's stupid and childish but I always like a new challenge

Anyway now you have the full story (hope it's clear enough) and I'm still seeking ideas on how to achieve this. Thanks!

[eluser]WanWizard[/eluser]
No way you can fake that other than using (public) proxies.

Just post the URL here, and we'll generate some traffic from other parts of the world (is his sister worth looking at? ).

[eluser]Berik[/eluser]
[quote author="WanWizard" date="1277476554"]No way you can fake that other than using (public) proxies.

Just post the URL here, and we'll generate some traffic from other parts of the world (is his sister worth looking at? ).[/quote]

Actually I don't know as she lives across the country and I never met her

Back to the subject...
I did suggest to my client (which btw has also become a friend) that while I'm hunting down for a more practical solution, he took the time to post on forums and blogs to generate some natural trafic.

following your suggestion of using public proxies I'll do a check to find if some have an API that I can hit from a php script. That could definitly help out in solving his problem

Thanks also for proposing to click the links to her website (yes linkS as she has 5 domains that point to the same site) but I won't post them here as I personnaly believe that it would be spamming and abusing these great forums and overthrow the great respect I have for this community. So I'll just let him do the dirty spamming work in other places.

[eluser]WanWizard[/eluser]
If it's just about hits and IP's in the log, you could also google for "free web monitoring service".

These kind of services check a URL at given intervals to see if the site is still available. Which will log a HTTP request in the log...

[eluser]Berik[/eluser]
[quote author="WanWizard" date="1277494695"]If it's just about hits and IP's in the log, you could also google for "free web monitoring service".

These kind of services check a URL at given intervals to see if the site is still available. Which will log a HTTP request in the log...[/quote]

Wow why didn't I think about that? It's a perfect solution! thank you