On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> wrote: > I want to run torture tests against an https server on domain A; I have > configured apache on the server to respond to a specific hostname ipaddress. > > I don't want to torture the live server so I have set up an alternate > instance on a different ip address.
Since you mention urllib2, I'm assuming this is Python 2.x, not 3.x. The exact version may be significant. Can you simply query the server by IP address rather than host name? According to the docs, urllib2.urlopen() doesn't check the certificate, so it should be accepted. Or does the server insist on the hostname being correct? Failing that, you could monkey-patch socket.create_connection, which seems to be the thing that ultimately does the work. Something like this: import socket. orig_create_connection = socket.create_connection def create_connection(address, *args, **kwargs): if address == "domainA": address = "1.2.3.4" return orig_create_connection(address, *args, **kwargs) socket.create_connection = create_connection # Proceed to use urllib2.urlopen() Untested, but may do what you want. Normally, though, I'd look at just changing the hosts file, if at all possible. You're right that it does change state for your whole computer, but it's generally the easiest solution. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list