Automating lynx prompt enties

cmfarley19 · 01-22-2004, 09:53 AM

A couple of us on campus use shh tuneling to access our private e-mail accounts on our home machine. Recently, "The Man" installed some firewall software that requires us to authenticate a connection to the 'net. If using Windows or Linux GUI, a standard dialog box pops up, you enter your username and password info click 'OK' and you're good to go.

From command line Linux, if you run something that needs access to the net, no prompt is displayed and the system hangs until a connection time out.

We found a way around this by running lynx and requesting a common sit like www.somesite.com.

Code:

$ lynx www.yahoo.com

lynx launches, requests the site, the firewall says "Hey, you're not authorized" then askes for a username.

Code:

Username for 'FW-1.      Reason: no user      FW-1 ' at server 'XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX':

You enter your user name then...

Code:

Password:

You enter your password and your in.

You now have an authenticated connection to the net to use as you please.

The session expires after X minutes or X minutes of inactivity. (Haven't figured that one out yet.

What we want to do is run a cron job that will automate the above process.
1) Launch lynx and request a site
2) Enter username and password when and if prompted

We're stuck on how to automate the entry of the username and password.

Anyone have any ideas?

cmfarley19 · 01-22-2004, 10:32 AM

After seaching some related posts, I decided to read the lynx man page.

Code:

$lynx -auth=username:password www.somesite.com

will do the trick.

stickman · 01-22-2004, 12:21 PM

Or you might consider putting it in a conf file so that anyone who does a ps won't see your password.

cmfarley19 · 01-22-2004, 12:31 PM

Stickman...
Unfamiliar with the conf file.
Do tell...

stickman · 01-22-2004, 09:52 PM

From the man page for lynx:
-cfg=FILENAME specifies a Lynx configuration file other than the default lynx.cfg.

Find the lynx.cfg (probably somewhere in /etc), and use it as a basis for a personal config file.

cmfarley19 · 01-23-2004, 08:09 AM

Stickman... thanks. Will try.

All...
New question...
I worte two small shell scripts
tunnel_start.sh

Code:

#!/bin/bash

lynx -auth=uname:password www.yahoo.com

and tunnel_stop.sh

Code:

#!/bin/bash

kill `ps aux | grep  lynx |  grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

I've mad the following crontab entries:

Code:

0 7-16 * * 1-5 /home/cfarley/lynx/tunnel_start.sh #> /dev/null 2> /dev/null 
1 7-16 * * 1-5 /home/cfarley/lynx/tunnel_stop.sh #> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

The first script executes and dies immediately. Here is the output:

Code:

  Your Terminal type is unknown!

  Enter a terminal type: [vt100] 
TERMINAL TYPE IS SET TO vt100
(B)0[1;24r[m[?7h[?1h=[H[J[21B[0;7mLooking up www.yahoo.com first[m
[0;7mGetting http://www.yahoo.com/[m 
[0;7mLooking up www.yahoo.com[m     [5D
[0;7mwww.yahoo.com[m           [22;14H
[0;7mMaking HTTP connection to www.yahoo.com[m
[0;7mSending HTTP request.[m                  [22;22H
[0;7mHTTP request sent; waiting for response.[m

[24;1H
[?1l>

I would expect that the first script would launch lynx, run for 1 minute, then the second script would kill lynx.

I would also expect lynx to have authenticated the firewall prompt as it does if you execute the command from the command line.

It did not.

Any thoughts?

stickman · 01-23-2004, 03:23 PM

You could use -dump or -source so that Lynx exits after it grabs the page the you don't need the second script to kill Lynx.