[wellylug] Automatically retrieving certificate and webpage via HTTPS

[David Antliff]

When I was on Paradise.net, I wrote and maintained a script that 
downloaded my current cable Internet data usage data. It used wget and a 
username/password pair to access the webpage and did a few calculations 
on it to help me keep track of things.

I have since moved to Ihug and things are a little different - the Data 
Usage page requires an SSL authenticated session to be established (via 
their web login page) before the Data Usage page can be accessed, 
otherwise it simply redirects to an 'error' page informing the user to 
log in.

I don't really know much about SSL and HTTPS yet, so my question is - 
can this login process be automated somehow so that I can modify my 
script to collect usage data from Ihug? How do I go about obtaining a 
certificate from their server? Do certificates only last a short period 
of time? wget has --certificate=file which could be used I presume if I 
can get the certificate somehow.

-- 
David.