interacting with shell - another newbie question

[James]

Hello,

I work in this annoying company where I have to autheticate myself to
the company firewall every 30-50 minutes in order to access the
internet.  (I think it's a checkpoint fw).

I have to run "telnet what.ever.ip.address 259" then it prompts me
with userid, then password, then I have to select "1".  Then the
program closes itself and the internet is enabled.

I would like to automate this process with Python and run it every 30
miniutes so I don't have to keep typing in these userid/password
everytime.  How can this be done?  Is there a module I can use to
interact with the shell? (I'm running linux)

Thank you.

James