Re: [hobbit] Http login test

[Ricardas Vaitkus <Ricardas.Vaitkus (at) seb.lt>]

Thank you very much, Ralph, you saved me a lot of time. I really owe you
I think I am not the only one facing such need. Don't you think that your
scripts can be placed in Xymonton for easy access?

Regards
Ricardas

Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell (at) gmail.com> wrote on 25/05/2009 18:23:48:

> It was titled "Hobbit content check script".  Here's the body of the
> message, and the attachments:
>
> Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier - I've been fighting with perl
> & SOAP, trying to get some status messages out of a bunch of load
> balancers.  I think I finally got it now....
>
> Attached (hopefully :) are a couple of files I tried to post to the
> list some time last year.  There's a shell script that does a login to
> a Siteminder site, and a perl script evolved from something Daniel
> Stenberg wrote - he's the original author of curl.  Daniel's very
> active on the curl mailing list, by the way, along with a bunch of
> other helpful folks, if it starts going weird on you.
>
> The Siteminder login probably won't be much use to you as is, but it
> demonstrates a few things I've worked out over the years.  Like, the
> standard options string to pass to curl, collecting messages along the
> way, and loading up the message string with a Manual Check url at the
> end for ops to try the check for themselves before waking people up...
>
> You can put almost *anything* into the message string that gets sent
> to Hobbit.  Right now I have scripts that check car rentals at travel
> sites for a particular company and emit a table of the current prices.
> Another script hits a cruise monitor and puts out a list using the
> &red and &green dots to mark cruise lines as reachable or not.  You
> can push out font color and size changes, urls to saved pages, etc.
>
> As far as cookies go, I generally just have curl save them whenever
> it finishes:
>
>  curl -b cookies -c cookies .....
>
> If you do that you can go look at the cookies and see what came in.
> Other things become possible too, such as editing cookies in between
> curl calls.  If you do keep cookies, though, the *first* thing you
> should do in the script is delete the cookie file.  That's like
> clearing the browser cookie cache, and can avoid a lot of mysterious
> errors.
>
> Finally, if you think you might spend some time on web site scripts,
> there's a Firefox extension that is absolutely invaluable -
> LiveHTTPheaders.  It shows you *exactly* what the browser sends to the
> server, as well as what it gets back - not the page content, just the
> headers, but that's all you need to recreate the sequence.  It even
> works twith secure sites.  If you see something going out that you
> can't account for, the usual suspect is javascript.  I've seen
> javascript that assembles a url on the fly from form elements, fiddles
> with some of the form elements, then posts the form.  That kind of
> thing can be difficult to nail down, and almost impossible to
> replicate...
>
> Ralph Mitchell
> 2009/5/25 Ricardas Vaitkus <Ricardas.Vaitkus (at) seb.lt>
> Hi Ralph
>
> I tried to find your message in mail archive, but I couldn't. Can you
tell
> me the title of your message, because by date I was not able to find it.
>
> Thanks
> Ricardas
>
> Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell (at) gmail.com> wrote on 22/05/2009 19:48:51:
>
> > I did a whole lot of that for my last employer.  As far as I know
> > they still use my scripts to run about 2500 checks on roughly 300
> servers.
> >
> > See my message on Jun 7, 2007 at 12:08 AM in the mail archive for
> > details and a sample script.
> >
> > Ralph Mitchell
>

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> [attachment "hobbitcontentcheckscript.zip" deleted by Ricardas
> Vaitkus/VBankas]