Usasge meter no longer working

[gstark]

Our developers have suspended the XML feed,

And not do anybody the courtesy of letting people know?

While I understand what they've done, and why it's been done, surely a little bit of communication (before this was implemented) with your users ... perhaps as simple as an informative post here (after all, isn't that exactly what this forum is for?) ... might have been in order?

Thanks for the information; it's great to know what's happened, even if it's a bit later than what I might have considered to be optimal.

[gstark]

The best meters are all local scripts. What app owner?

I suspect (but I'm really guessing) that they might mean the app developer, in that any developer might embed hooks that could "call home" with a user's credentials into an app.

[Dazzled]

In this age of smartphones any abuse is possible. Phone users seem to a have dispensed with caution.

Exetel has always provided an XML feed since the early days when so many of the users were technically capable. Decoding this standard data format is quick and trivial. To secure the login isn't difficult, and it would be appreciated if the service came back.

[stevebow]

My Firefox Net Usage extension is no longer working because the xml feed was killed, without notice, which is somewhat annoying.

Will there be an alternative method provided without having to log in to member's facilities?

Thanks,
Steve

[James]

James, as you will remember, the website code has a long history of difficulties with this sort of thing, and scraping is not something to encourage. An SSL connection to the XML feed instead of simple GET or POST would do the job without dispute.

The best meters are all local scripts. There isn't an app owner.

This was not my idea, and I have asked for more information as to what we can do to give access to customers.

[James]

Our developers have suspended the XML feed,

And not do anybody the courtesy of letting people know?

While I understand what they've done, and why it's been done, surely a little bit of communication (before this was implemented) with your users ... perhaps as simple as an informative post here (after all, isn't that exactly what this forum is for?) ... might have been in order?

Thanks for the information; it's great to know what's happened, even if it's a bit later than what I might have considered to be optimal.

I guess two reasons, security concerns, and secondly it isn't a supported feature.

[James]

I have asked if this can be extended while alternatives are explored.

[garfin]

Yay! finally my forum access seems sorted/reactivated. following thread..

Screenshots of Toid's Usage Meter, (one of many meters' it seems) throwing a fit over XML feed issue..

Compact Mode - No error message, but Data not updating either.

UsageMeter3.jpg (12.89 KiB) Viewed 3685 times

Main Screen - Expanded.

UsageMeter2.jpg (52.9 KiB) Viewed 3685 times

Test page.

UsageMeter.jpg (55.11 KiB) Viewed 3685 times

[James]

I don't think this will be continued, I have had the usage of this feed investigated, and less than 0.7% of our ADSL customers have used it this year.

I would suggest just quickly logging into the My Exetel page for up to date information on your services.

[Dazzled]

That would be a shame James, as it was an original lauded feature of Exetel from the earliest days.

The website has many difficulties, including problems with some browsers and coding standards - all of which were discussed to death here a long time ago. A user's meter can extract the data by scraping the website, but it isn't something to encourage. Placing a more secure login on the XML feed is trivial.

[Chris T]

I don't think this will be continued, I have had the usage of this feed investigated, and less than 0.7% of our ADSL customers have used it this year.

I would suggest just quickly logging into the My Exetel page for up to date information on your services.

One reason for the low usage of the feed is that it hasn't worked for me at all this year on the odd times I checked. In fact the feed hasn't worked for me for many months.

One advantage of the feed is it is automatically updated whichever way we access it. The My Exetel page timesout, so we have to be entering the login details all the time. And lately, I found the data is not so up-to-date either.

[James]

That would be a shame James, as it was an original lauded feature of Exetel from the earliest days.

The website has many difficulties, including problems with some browsers and coding standards - all of which were discussed to death here a long time ago. A user's meter can extract the data by scraping the website, but it isn't something to encourage. Placing a more secure login on the XML feed is trivial.

I have asked, but this is no likely something that will be approved, especially based on the decreasing historical use of this meter over the last couple of years.

[oblong]

I have asked, but this is no likely something that will be approved, especially based on the decreasing historical use of this meter over the last couple of years.

That's a pity. It's so much easier to just glance at the browser toolbar.

[StrawHat]

James
Can you at least ask your "developers" to change the error message from
"error=Incorrect User/Pass" to something like
"xml service no longer available"

This would save the other .69% of us from spending hours trying to get our parsers working on data that isn't even accessible anymore.

[sfeerick]

For anyone still following this... it looks like

Code: Select all

https://www.exetel.com.au/myexetel/services/service_usage_adsl_dashboard/<service-number>

is a way to scrape usage data, but it doesn't look like you can directly query it or supply login data to authenticate. It seems that you first need to login to member services, and then use the cookie generated authenticate.

A sanitised curl query that did work until the cookie expied (generated through chrome developer console):

Code: Select all

curl "https://www.exetel.com.au/myexetel/services/service_usage_adsl_dashboard/0123456789" -H "Cookie: hidden=value; hidden=value; PHPSESSID=clipped_data; ci_session=clipped_data" -H "Origin: https://www.exetel.com.au" -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br" -H "Accept-Language: en-AU,en-GB;q=0.9,en;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.7" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.87 Safari/537.36" -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8" -H "Accept: */*" -H "Referer: https://www.exetel.com.au/myexetel/" -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" -H "Connection: keep-alive" -H "DNT: 1" --data "service_number=0123456789" --compressed

and returned (?, 228GB usage, of 500GB service, timestamp):

Code: Select all

["noop",228,500,"2018-06-13 08:22:33"]

I'm sure that the request can be pared down, but I'm at a loss as to how to get curl to do the necessary login and authentication - cookie-jar doesn't seem to be working, so I'm sure there's something else I'm missing. Food for thought for anyone still interested.