Greetings!

I am happily using libcurl to build an add-on for the Big Brother
network monitor (http://bb4.com/). Part of this involves testing
that webservers are alive and respond to requests; libcurl has
made that job a lot easier.

One thing I am missing is the ability to control exactly which
server libcurl connects to when curl_easy_perform() is invoked.
At work I want to test a load-balanced set of servers; if I just
provide the hostname as "http://www.somesite.com/", I have no
control over which of the three DNS entries for "www.somesite.com"
I end up testing.

So my question is: Would it be possible to implement a libcurl
function that tells curl which IP-address to connect to,
bypassing the normal DNS lookup ? Something like

   curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_SERVER_IP, "192.168.1.2");
   curl_easy_setopt(handle, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.foo.com/");
   curl_easy_perform(handle);

I guess it *could* be done by mangling the URL to replace the
hostname with the IP-address I want, then calling curl_easy_setopt
with CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER and defining the "Host:" header. But
I'd rather avoid mangling the URL myself.

-- 
Henrik Storner
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