Using Curl to retrieve information from Dell Website for multiple PCs

[davil]

Hi all,

 

I'm having a problem retrieving some information from the Dell website.

I want to write the PHP to go through a text file and grab down warranty info etc from the Dell website for each service tag, I can parse the list no problem but first I want to make sure I can get info down for just one machine,

 

I can do it in my browser like so:

 

IF YOU JUST WANT TO GET INFO FROM TAB1 [WARRANTY INFO], USE THIS (replace ABCDEFG with whatever service tag):

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=ABCDEFG&~wsf=tabs

 

IF YOU JUST WANT TO GET INFO FROM TAB2 [ORIGINAL SYSTEM CONFIGURATION], USE THIS (replace ABCDEFG with whatever service tag):

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=ABCDEFG&~tab=2&~wsf=tabs

 

 

but when I use curl.exe (I'm on Windows) it just gives me HTML of a page requesting the service tag again.

 

As you will see in my code I tried spoofing my user agent, but with no luck.

 

<?php

// spoofing Useragent 
$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1"; 
$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.400.0 Safari/533.9";
$useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)";
//I've tried all of these strings, but to no avail

$serial='abcdefg-replacewithyourownserialnumber';
$url="http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=$serial&~tab=2&~wsf=tabs";

$stringtosend="curl --user-agent \"$useragent\" -0 $url";

$txt=shell_exec($stringtosend);
echo $txt;
?>

 

also the reason I'm using curl.exe and not PHP's curl classes is because I'm behind a proxy and was able to use "proxifier" to re-route curl.exe requests but couldn't get PHP working the same way (tried php.exe , should I have tried apache.exe? )

 

anyway if anybody knows why the page would react differently to curl than it would in browser , any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

[davil]

In the end I figured out the way to set the proxy before using PHP's proper curl, and it worked. sorry.

 

The following code reads the info into a variable , $x

 

$ch = curl_init("http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/details?c=us&l=en&s=gen&ServiceTag=$serial&~tab=2&~wsf=tabs"); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, "http://10.10.10.10:80");   // Where 10.10.10.10 is the proxy IP and 80 is the port
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYPORT, 80);   // Dunno why port 80 is set twice, but I copied this code and it works great
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, "myusername:mypassword"); 
$x = curl_exec($ch);