Help - Simulating about 3000 IP addresses behind a firewall

May Peace be unto You,

This is my first post on this forum, and as with everything that is new to us, there are feelings of excitement, apprehension and a lot of expectations in my mind from this forum.

Without using anymore precious real estate on this page, allow me to straightaway cut to the chase: I have a firewall in my network that I need to test for performance and load. The firewall's designed to handle (i.e. monitor & create reports of) about 2500+ machines simultaneously and can also sync with the local LDAP server to gather info on who's using which computer.

Now -as might be evident from the title of this post- I do not have thousands of machines at my disposal to readily test whether the firewall's doing what its designed to do or not, and am thus looking for a way to simulate 3000+ IP addresses using the limited no. of clients (about 50 computers running MS Windows) that I have so as to make the firewall think that there are 3000+ clients behind it, and thereafter generate reports of their activity in its DB.

A(nother) limitation is that I have to run this test for an hour i.e. 3000+ computers browsing the internet for an hour, so there's very time I could spend changing IPs.

My questions to you are:

1. I know that a network adapter can be assigned multiple Virtual IPs - Would it be possible to send individual HTTP requests using each Virtual IP address so that the firewall can log the IP?

2. I know of IP Spoofing, however I'm not very familiar with the techniques that could be used - Do you think it would be a better bet than using Virtual IPs? Could you guide me to some tutorial/software that does it?

3. Could I somehow modify the HTTP headers of the requests being sent out from the machine to change the IP address at runtime? The firewall 'might' be sniffing these packets and thus could be tricked into thinking the request's coming from a different IP.

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your time.

Bump!
Umm... Did I ask this one in the wrong part of the forum? Could someone guide me to the right forum for this please?

No, you pretty much asked it in the right spot. It was a holiday weekend for starters, and typically if you don't get an answer here within a day or so of asking, it's usually because nobody really has a good answer for you.

I've never had any need or reason to do anything like that so I don't have an answer for you either.