Getting a 401 from requests.get, but not when logging in via the browser.

dcwhatthe at gmail.com dcwhatthe at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 15:47:11 EDT 2020


On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 3:16:51 PM UTC-4, Barry Scott wrote:
> > On 21 Apr 2020, at 18:11, dc wrote:
> > 
> > On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 12:40:25 PM UTC-4, Dieter Maurer wrote:
> >> dc wrote at 2020-4-20 14:48 -0700:
> >>> ...
> >>> I tried telneting the landing page, i.e. without the specific node that requires the login.  So e.g.
> >>> 
> >>> Telnet thissite.oh.gov 80
> >>> 
> >>> , but it returns a 400 Bad Request.  Before that, the Telnet screen is completely blank ; I have to press a key before it returns the Bad Request.
> >>> 
> >>> 
> >>> Roger on knowing what the site is asking for.  But I don't know how to determine that.
> >> 
> >> I use `wget -S` to learn about server responses.
> >> I has the advantage (over `telnet`) to know the HTTP protocl.
> > 
> > Sure enough, wget DOES return a lot of information.  In fact, although an initial response of 401 is returned, it waits for the response and finally returns a 200.
> > 
> > So, I guess the question finally comes down to:  How do we make the requests.get() wait for a response?  The timeout value isn't the same thing that I thought it was.  So how do we tell .get() to wait 20 or 30 seconds for an OK response?
> 
> The way HTTP protocol works is that you send a request and get a response. 1 in 1 out.
> The response can tell you that you need to do more work, like add authentication data.
> 
> The only use of the timeout is to allow you to give up if a response does not comeback
> before you get bored waiting.
> 
> In the case of the 401 you can read what it means here: https://httpstatuses.com/401
> 
> It is then up to your code to issue a new request with the requirer authentication headers.
> The headers you got back in the first response will tell you what type of authentication is requires,
> basic, digest etc.
> 
> The library you are using should be able to handle this if you provide what the library requires from
> you to do the authenticate.
> 
> Personally I debug stuff using the curl command. curl -v <url> shows you the request and the response.
> You can then add curl options to provide authenicate data (username/password) and how to use it --basic
> and --digest for example.
> 
> Oh and the other status that needs handling is a 302 redirect. This allows a web site to more a page
> and tell you the new location. Again you have to allow your library to do this for you.
> 
> Barry
> 
> 
> 
> > 
> > -- 
> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> >

Barry, Thanks.  I'm starting to get a bigger picture, now.

So I really do need to raise the status, in order to get the headers  I had put this in orginally, but then thought it wasn't necessary.

So in the case of this particular site, if I understand correctly, I would be using the NTLM to decide which type of Authentication to follow up with (I think).

Content-Length:          1293
Content-Type:            text/html
WWW-Authenticate:        Negotiate, NTLM



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