[nycbug-talk] silly snarf tricks

[Pete Wright]

Mikel King wrote:

>    A while back I was playing around with snarf which is a command 
> line utility for pulling web content...Ok so no real big deal there 
> FreeBSD has fetch which does the same thing. However snarf is cool in 
> that you can drop a switch that tells it to return a precompiled 
> HTTP_USER_AGENT.
>
>    Now aside from messing with my web developers heads a bit, cause I 
> modified the code to return a (Mozilla 5; on a Banana Jr 2000...) and 
> lately I've changed it to match my FreeBSD 5.1 install on my laptop. 
> Then I scripted it in a cron job to run once a minute and grab 5 pages 
> from our company website. OK this really screwed with the web 
> stats...but it was harmless fun. I mean we now get 3800 hits per day 
> from a machine pretending to be Mozilla 1.6 on FreeBSD 5.1.
>
>    I guess what I am wondering is if anyone can devise a praticle use 
> for this?
>
>    I did use it to scriptout a daily pull of the intelligent updater 
> from Symantec, and place it into my companies ftp server. But that's 
> really nothing magical...
>
hey who said messing with web devs was not a practicle use ;)  seriously 
tho, i would imagine that this was developed to help get past buggy 
sites that only allow IE/NT to access files.  do you think it would 
allow you grab files from windows update?  prolly not tho b/c of all the 
ActiveX scripts etc...

-p

-- 
~~~oO00Oo~~~
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
www.nomadlogic.org/~pete