Some accumulated wisdom and another question:
Some sniffing and blundering around on the net led me to the Crypt::SSLeay docs page, which says: 
At the time of this writing, libwww v5.6 seems to proxy https requests
+ fine with an Apache mod_proxy server. It sends a line like:

  GET https://www.nodeworks.com HTTP/1.1

to the proxy server, which is not the CONNECT request that some proxie
+s would expect, so this may not work with other proxy servers than mo
+d_proxy. The CONNECT method is used by Crypt::SSLeay's internal proxy
+ support.

[download]
Sure enough, using Crypt::SSLeay style proxy specification for HTTPS, I get the login page I have sought so long.

The new problem? it doesn't appear to get decrypted. When I print out $a->content, I get gibberish. That's going to make it difficult to Mechanize the login.

Update:
It turns out that the silly headers I was passing to make my script look more like a browser were the problem. I made my script not pass them in the HTTPS request, and suddenly I had a normal web page.

Problem solved, thanks for your help, and I hope that somebody finds this useful down the road.

The PerlMonk tr/// Advocate

In reply to Solved! Re: More Mechanize Woes by Roy Johnson
in thread More Mechanize Woes by Roy Johnson

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.