Automatic Netaccess Authentication

To get internet access for Students and Employees at IITM, one needs to login to the Netaccess (i.e. IITM's Internet Access) Portal, which apparently lasts for 24hrs and then again you have to login else the credentials will get expired and thus no internet access for you at all. So, out of frustration of repeatedly logging in everyday doing the same task like a moron, I created multiple versions of automatically doing this tedious task.

C and Libcurl version

Compile it for your own machine using:

gcc -o auto-netaccess auto-netaccess.c -lcurl

Ensure you have libcurl installed on your system.

And then to execute it: ./auto-netaccess [username] [password]

Username and password as arguments are optional and can be embedded in the source code directly.

Python Version

Requests

If you are using the *-req.py file, then you need not install anything other than the vanilla python3.

python auto_netaccess-req.py

NOTE

Change the USERNAME and PASSWORD in the .py file and execute it. Read the script before executing, it's fairly straight-forward. You may ignore everything below this point.

Prerequisites

Requirements can be installed via:

    sudo apt install firefox-geckodriver -y && \
    pip install -U selenium
    # Tested with selenium==4.5.0

NOTE

Change the USERNAME and PASSWORD in the .py file and execute it. Read the script before executing, it's fairly straight-forward.

Later setup a cron job or a systemd-timer to automatically run it after a certain interval of time. Not gonna go in details on how to set timers here, as it is operating system independent.