some environments (like mine) will actually try to do some other redirects before we get to the external_link view. We need to follow all redirects so that we are more likely to actually trigger the view we want to test
in this test, we actually cause a system error exception because we try to write something that's not an IP to the database
validate the remote_addr and zero it out if it's invalid.

I had a bad remoteaddr happen on my server, I think it came from xforwardedfor header where the first value in there was "unknown". It happens...