Toxy, a hackable HTTP proxy to simulate failure scenarios | Hacker News Reader

Toxy, a hackable HTTP proxy to simulate failure scenarios

github.com

130 pointsjsnell15 comments

This looks suspiciously similar to https://github.com/Shopify/toxiproxy which is an older project. It even uses similar naming "toxic" "poisons".

Suspicious seems inappropriately sinister. The project you linked is a go project, the OP is JavaScript. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

Along with this and Kong there is also https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog for testing SMTP failure scenarios on outgoing email.

I wrote a similar thing to this too: https://github.com/hitchtest/hitchsmtp#bad-smtp-server

It just outputs the mail it receives to stdout as JSON for easy parsing. Sending to specific email addresses "e.g. 451-please-try-again-later@smtperrors.com" will trigger specific SMTP errors.

Doesn't appear to support https. Ideally a similar mechanism to say Fiddler/Charles Proxy where a certificate is provided and appropriately translates the https between both sides of the connection. Obviously you would need to trust a new root. I'm fine with that on a dev/qe machine.

Basically, DNS injection for a machine would mean no noticeable difference in HTTPS.

Similar project: http://greim.github.io/hoxy/ - It also has throttling and latency simulation, but not as fine-grained. It's focus is more generally on debugging and traffic manipulation.

Would it be possible to sort traffic by L2 or L3, and only apply to certain MACs or IP addresses? I can see that being very useful for PXE and provisioning in "cloud" environments.

You can create your own rule to do that, for instance, inspect the request remote connection address.

Then, you can apply that rule to the bandwidth poison. The poison will be only applicable if the rule passes.

On linux netem can help you do something similar. It is also faster, better tested, has more features and so on.

I guess an argument can be made about the user interface, as tc is a nightmare. :-)

A somewhat related tool that is also very useful is mitmproxy.

Please make airbnb run this. Their site is such utter cow dung on a flaky connection. It would cache broken assets, they must test with a 1G connection to the colo.

Similar project: https://vaurien.readthedocs.org

is there a "verbose" option?

This is amazing! It would work very well with any API gateway like KONG [1], especially to test unexpected network conditions for our internal APIs.

[1] https://github.com/Mashape/kong

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