[TriLUG] marginally OT: Some bandwidth and DoS questions

[Magnus]

Matt Nash wrote:
> DoS
> -Have you ever heard of anyone (ab)using wget to accomplish a deliberate 
> non-distributed DoS attack?

I've heard of the ACCUSATION of this but really there are legit purposes
for doing this as well.  If a webmaster has problems with people
crunching too much bandwidth this can be effectively handled via rate
limiting.  If there is indeed cause to believe the traffic is abusive in
nature the client can be firewalled.  But I don't think it is fair at
all to assume that a wget of a whole site is abusive.

> -Could this be done with wget? 

Yes.  axel might be better though.

> -Is there any resource on the internet which outlines how much data a 
> computer with a given processor is capable of putting on a network 
> interface?

There are way too many variables to stick a number on that.

> wget
> -Have you ever heard of anyone using wget to back up entire websites?

Yes.  This is a legit use of the tool.

> -Would using this method on a PHP-based website actually accomplish a 
> backup?  It seems to me that it would only gather the generated HTML and 
> Javascript.

No.  It would just back up the html generated by the php.  It would not
back up the php itself.  The php is interpreted by the web server before
going out to the client.