Monks, I have an Overland NEO4100 tape library, a beast with 60-odd tapes and two tape drives. Sometimes its notion of which tape is stored where and the backup software get out of sync. This causes a certain amount of grief because the software tells the library to load tape A, and when it reads the tape header it finds it has tape B instead.

As far as I know this information (tape A is in slot 14, tape B is mounted on drive 2 etc. etc.) isn't available via SNMP. The tape library has a web interface that displays this information, and so I'd like to scrape it. Access to the web page is authenticated. No password, no web.

The problem is that the authentication is performed by a Java applet. All it does is take a password (two different passwords are admitted, for read-only or administration privileges) and a couple of checkboxes, one of which lets you choose a presentation that uses <frame>s (the default) or without.

If I GET the home page of the library, it gives, in all its glory: 

<html>
<head>
<P><TABLE BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=0 WIDTH="100%">
<TR><TD WIDTH="100%" ALIGN=CENTER>
<APPLET CODE="Login.class" WIDTH=545 HEIGHT=418
ALT="[ Login applet is not available ]">
<PARAM NAME=BrowserId VALUE=8b9b1edea86776b6953e24cdfab8e8ce>
<PARAM NAME=Personality VALUE=0>
<P ALIGN=LEFT>If this message is visible, you probably need to enable 
+Java operation for your brows.
</APPLET>
</TD></TR></TABLE>
</BODY></HTML>

[download]

Does anyone have some clues on the best way to proceed? I have a feeling that I shall have to use tcpdump to see what the Java applet sends to server, and mimick that. Or is there Another Way To Do It?

Aside: I do like the Extreme Body Modification bit about having brows that are Java-enabled.

- another intruder with the mooring of the heat of the Perl

In reply to How to screen-scrape a page that uses a Java applet for authentication? by grinder

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