Cheshire Cat Computing

Hi Steve,

A co-worker noticed a posting on a mailing list that suggested using check_website for monitoring blackboard. What I actually want to do is perform a login and then make sure the page returned is sane. The problem is that blackboard uses some javascript-foo to create a md5 hash of a base64 encoding of the password, which is uses for the actual authentication. As it stands it seems like check_website is unable to do custom things like making such a hash. Do you have any suggestions, perhaps permitting a plugin feature for check_website? If you want to see the entire login page to go . Here is the javascript in question:

var _useChallenge = false;
function validate_form(form)
{
if ( form.user_id.value == "" || form.password.value == "" )
{
alert( "Please enter a username and password." );
return false;
}
//short-cut if challenge/response is disabled.
if ( !_useChallenge )
{
form.encoded_pw.value = base64encode( form.password.value );
form.password.value = "";
return true;
}

var passwd_enc = calcMD5(form.password.value);
var final_to_encode = passwd_enc + form.one_time_token.value;
form.encoded_pw.value = calcMD5(final_to_encode);
form.password.value = "";
return true;
}

Actually I think I know what to do now, but the plugin idea or custom functions still seems like a good idea. Let me know what you think.

Making check_website support javascript would be too difficult, really. In this case, it may be better to get a commercial product like SiteScope and then feed the alerts from this into Nagios (we do this for the more complex pages that cant be done with check_website).

As far as plugins go, I'm not sure if I'm going to be developing check_website any further because webinject seems to do the same job and supports both Nagios and MRTG - and is more flexible, although harder to configure.

Webinject doesnt support javascript either, but is better at handling forms. Complex forms and framesets are better handled by sitescope.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11