Shizzle has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello again Monks,

Some of you may know of the form on the USPS website that enables you to check addresses:

http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/lookup_zip+4.html

[download]

which, in turn runs the CGI script

http://www.usps.com/cgi-bin/zip4/zip4inq2

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Around a month ago, I wrote a perl script using LWP to check a list of addresses automatically. Just today, I ran the script again and got this reponse:

HTTP/1.0 302 (Found) Not Allowed
Location: http://148.129.65.3:80/fwauthredirect148.129.65.9id000386429
+5
Content-Length: 120
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 15:21:08 GMT
Client-Peer: 56.0.78.101:80

Your request is being redirected to :<a href="http://148.129.65.3:80/f
+wauthredirect148.129.65.9id0003864295">here</a>.

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Assuming my script was accessing a port other than 80, I modified my script to include the URL:

http://www.usps.com:80/cgi-bin/zip4/zip4inq2

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But I got the same 302 Not Allowed message. Does this mean it is now impossible for me to access the CGI script via LWP? I always thought any CGI script you can access via a form on a web page can be accessed with LWP. Please enlighten. Thanks in advance for your help.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: POST with LWP yields HTTP 302 Not Allowed - Too bad for me?
by dsheroh (Monsignor) on May 15, 2002 at 15:42 UTC
    No, it means that your request was being redirected to http://148.129.65.3:80/fwauthredirect148.129.65.9id0003864295 and you need to resubmit it to that URI.

    When your browser gets a 302 (client-side redirect) message, it automagically follows it without bothering you. When you use LWP, you're taking control of things at a lower level, so you have to notice the 302, get the returned Location: header, and resubmit the request to that address yourself.

[reply]
      Thanks for your reply, although I'm still misisng it. I ran the program again, went down to the line that had the "Location:" header, and copied the redirection URI into my code, which is below:

      #!/opt/gnu-irix/bin/perl

use strict;

use HTTP::Request::Common;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;

#my $formurl = 'http://www.usps.com:80/cgi-bin/zip4/zip4inq2';
my $formurl = 
'http://148.129.65.3:80/fwauthredirect148.129.65.9id0003869786';
my $formdata = [
  'Firm' => '',
  'Urbanization' => '',
  'Delivery Address' => '100 Southland Vlg',
  'City' => '',
  'State' => '',
  'Zip Code' => '36079-3044',
  'Submit' => 'Process'
];

print $formurl, "\n";
my $resp = $ua->request(POST $formurl, $formdata);

if ($resp->is_success())
{
  print $resp->content();
}
else
{
  print "Problem\n\n", $resp->as_string();
}

      [download]

      Running the program generated a similar response:

      HTTP/1.0 302 (Found) Not Allowed
Location: http://148.129.65.3:80/fwauthredirect148.129.65.9id000386993
+7
Content-Length: 120
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 15:57:42 GMT
Client-Peer: 56.0.78.101:80

Your request is being redirected to :<a href="http://148.129.65.3:80/f
+wauthredirect148.129.65.9id0003869937">here</a>.

      [download]

      It appears that I simply got redirected again. Please advise. Thanks.

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Re: POST with LWP yields HTTP 302 Not Allowed - Too bad for me?
by jsprat (Curate) on May 15, 2002 at 16:24 UTC
    'fwauthredirect' is a message from your firewall (FW1). Does this same error happen when running the script with a direct connection? 56.0.78.101 is the ip address of usps.com, I'm assuming 148.129.65.3 (or 9) is the firewall's ip. You should probably talk to whoever administers the firewall.
[reply]
      While talking to my sys admin, it dawned on me that our firewall had not authenticated me from the account where the perl scripts were written. See, when I was trying to figure out why I could use my browser and not LWP, I was surfing with IE on my local PC. So, from the Unix account where my perl scripts were, I fired up Netscape and typed www.usps.com. I supplied the firewall with my username and password, ran the perl script again, and got the desired results. Thanks to everyone for your feedback.
[reply]
        It seems now the Post office doesn't let this work anymore:

        HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
        Connection: close
        Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:07:28 GMT
        Server: Netscape-Enterprise/6.0
        Vary: Accept-Encoding
        Allow: HEAD, GET
        Content-Length: 124
        Content-Type: text/html
        Client-Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:07:27 GMT
        Client-Peer: 96.16.57.188:80
        Client-Response-Num: 1
        Title: Method Not Allowed
[reply]

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