Perl - Using LWP or Similar - Logging into ITRC to Get Sec. Bulletins?

[Michael R. Monteith]

I was wondering if someone has already done this or similar. In order to get the earliest possible notification of security bulletins, we wanted a way to script going out to the ITRC, logging in, and getting to the security bulletins page. We tried LWP and get to the login screen. But not getting any further than that.

I'll post the code later. But mainly wanted to see if someone already invented that wheel.

Thanks
Michael

[Steven E. Protter]

There is a function to sign up for security bullitens already.

http://us-support.external.hp.com/digest/bin/doc.pl

Sign up and you get it all by email.

I'm sure procura/merijn(who I still owe work) has code that can be modified for the job.

The email is the reliable way to go.

SEP

[Michael R. Monteith]

Yes, I already subscribe to that. But we all know email is not reliable. In fact what brought this one was luckily I checked the web site and found the alert, but never got the email. Unfortunately neither did others. We can't afford that. Instead of me checking the web page manually it would be better if we had an automated way and we could page someone.

Thanks
Michael

[Steven E. Protter]

I must register my disagreement with regards to email's reliability versus itrc.

If you are going to write a perl script(you can) to go through itrc like Merijn does for statistics, it is going to be less reliable than email.

If you run your query between 12:30 a.m. and 1:00 a.m.(CST( You'll get nothing because some wild network thing is going on and itrc is non-responsive.

Then there is the three day outage of itrc due to the sql virus in February.

As I recall, I was still getting email from HP during those times.

Here is were to get the source code to start.
http://www.cmve.net/~merijn/#Statistics

It will get you to the basics of getting into itrc beyond the login. It will also probably use up all the band width you have while its running.

SEP

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

SEP, one major difference though: I do *NOT* use LWP, but wget (and/or lynx while debugging), because it proved to be more reliable and stable for ITRC access because of the reasons you just posted :)

Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[Michael R. Monteith]

I looked at the statistics software. It didn't look like it was going out to the website itself. I must be totally missing something. I didn't see any section about logging into a web site. I guess I'll keep digging on my own.

Thanks
Michael

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

In web2db, there is:

--8<---
sub webget ($$)
{
my ($t, $p) = @_;
$t = $t ? "-T 30 -t 5" : "";
(my $f = $p) =~ s:.*/::;
unlink $f;
printf STDERR "wget %-38s\t", $f;
my $now = time;
system "wget -q $t $p";
$p = time - $now;
$t = -s $f;
printf STDERR "[ %6d %5.1f kbps ]\n", $t, $t / $p / 1024;
$t;
} # webget
-->8---

The 'system "wget -q $t $p";' line does the access, using the wonderful external program wget. This is the only funtion that does access, so just scan for webget

HTH, Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[Michael R. Monteith]

The ITRC login does not use the normal userid and password parameters that you can use on say lwp or wget. I was hoping someone had actually used something to get past the login page on the ITRC. I'm going to dig up my old CGI book and I have some ideas. Just haven't had time lately. Thanks guys.

Michael