Posted by Nathan on 10/12/02 11:38

Hi there, hope you can help me.

Someone has a bunch of these routers and they each have a standard HTML
web-interface.

Because there are several over different locations they want to be able
to have a central web interface that can 'talk' to the routers and change
certain features on several routers at once. Because the routers offer
no alternative for configuration (like telnet) the idea is that I build
something to get a PHP script to pretend to be a browser.

I have the principles down of actually getting PHP to post to a webpage:
I can do a basic authorisation thing (i.e. like .htaccess) to get round
the login part and send post variables using fsockopen. I've tested this
with my own 'pretend' form interface and can get it to work (I can see
that info has been posted and written to the DB etc).

Then I try this with the router's actual interface using the same method,
and get the intended form variables by analysing the source of the HTML
to get the input field names, etc.

But it doesn't work. Obviously without knowing the router's source code
for its little internal webserver thingy it's hard to know where it's
going wrong, so I was just wondering if you had any thoughts as to what
sort of things may be stopping it. I suppose maybe it could have
something to do with sessions or something - so is there a way to 'see'
what's going on between Firefox and the web-server so I might find out
how to spoof this via a PHP script? I thought it might have something to
do with posting to a page which then has a refresh thing that posts to a
second page, and because of the way it works in my script, it doesn't go
to this second page, but I can't really tell if this is happening simply
by looking in my browser.

I'm this close to telling them it can't be done, but I thought I'd see if
there's something obvious I'm missing, because I'm a bit new to this
fsockopen business.

Thanks. Any help really appreciated.

--
Nathan.
Bow to the Cow!

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