Re: [Bug-wget] action on "not able to connect to proxy"

[Micah Cowan]

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Mohan gupta wrote:
> hello everyone ,
> greetings on my first mail to the list!!
> 
> Well I am using wget as a full webcrawler .Now I am behind my
> university proxy and i wanted to know what is the action taken by wget
> when the proxy server is off. I have configured it to use a proxy
> server and for retrieving urls it has been configured to make atmost 5
> attempts.
> In my system wget takes url from a database and retrieves them. When
> say proxy server is off i expect wget to exit() itself and not just
> pick url's from database and keep getting timedout  on them.
> 
> Is it what it really does??
> 
> I do not want wget to erroneously destroy my database of urls.!!

How in the world can wget destroy anything? Wget doesn't even know about
your database of URLs. If you're just throwing them out after a download
attempt, without trying to actually verify the downloads, then how is
that Wget's fault?

And, I'm unsure how you expect wget to behave one way when proxy is "on"
(timeout and try again), and another when it's "off". How is wget
supposed to know the difference? If the proxy is down, then ideally the
network should be configured to send back "No route to host" packets,
etc. But if wget doesn't receive any packets at all in response to
connection attempts, then how is it supposed to tell the difference
between a temporary network failure and a switched-off machine? You can
of course adjust wget's setting for how long it is willing to wait for a
timeout (which is currently quite liberal), but there is obviously no
way for it to understand that the machine is switched off, and that it
shouldn't bother continuing to try.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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