Re: lynx-dev No cookies with -dump?

[David Woolley]

> I have to log on to a server with asp technology, and it uses cookies to

ASP is a product not a technology.

> "know who I am". When I start lynx from the command line with the url, it
> loads okay but when I use the -dump option the server doesn't recognize me
> att all, although I've tried with -cfg, -cookie_file, -accept_all_cookies to
> make Lynx work. What is different when I use the -dump option and why won't
> the cookies be available to the remote server when I run Lynx with it?

The default cookies used by ASP are not to detect who you are but to 
correlate requests from the same session, where session normally means the
same invocation of a browser.  There is an assumption that the client
is interactive, or, I suppose, automated using DDE or OLE, i.e. a single
instance of the client handles the whole conversation.

Each command line invocation of Lynx is a distinct session, so ASP 
cannot correlate them.

One could probably have an option in Lynx to treat session cookies as though
they were persistent cookies with a ten minute lifetime, but Lynx's strength
is not really as an automation tool but as a text mode renderer.

It is also possible that real persistent cookies are being used to allow
user tracking without an obvious login, but this is not part of the 
intrinsic ASP processing, but something that has to be coded explicitly.
At least some versions of Lynx are reported to have problems with persistent
cookies in single shot command line mode.  (ASP, by default, uses Microsoft
proprietory authentication, which is not supported by Lynx, if it wants to
identify a user, rather than a session.  It can be made to use basic 
authentication.  Someone in MS offered to implement MS authentication, but
nothing has been heard since, and no-one has offered a source for a 
specification of the protocol used.)