Urllib conundrum

[Rick Kaye]

I wanted to write a Python program to retrieve and log my IP address from my
Linksys Cable router. The router interface is available through http. To get
the IP address manually, you access the router with a browser. However, the
router asks for a username and password before letting you get to the
interface. At first, I thought I would need to program the exchange of
authentication information. To listen in on how the browser was exchanging
this information, I installed the PC Magazine utility "Cookie Cop II"
(http://www.pcmag.com) which acts as a proxy and lets you listen in the
exchange between the browser and the outside world. But then I discovered
that Python's urllib module handled user authentication and it seemed all
was good. I wrote the program that appears below and it worked fine (with
Cookie Cop II's Cookie Cop function disabled and it's IE proxy function
enabled).

Now comes my problem. Since I no longer needed Cookie Cop II, I removed it.
But then my Python program stopped working. Normal browsing (through
Internet Explorer) worked fine. And my program could access webpages that
are not password protected (by changing the url). But the program no longer
worked to get to a password protected page.

The error occurs in the line:
page=router.open("http://192.168.1.1/Status.htm")
in the getstatuspage function as indicated below. The urllib code seems to
go into an infinite loop trying and failing to authenticate itself to the
router until I get a max recursion level error.

Can anyone shed light on why the program below works with the Cookie Cop II
proxy but not without it? Or I'd settle for how to make it work without the
proxy.

import urllib
import re

class myURLopener(urllib.FancyURLopener):
  def prompt_user_passwd(self, host, realm):
    return 'name', 'passwd'

def getstatuspage():
  router=myURLopener()
  page=router.open("http://192.168.1.1/Status.htm")  #The error occurs on
this line
  contents=page.readlines()
  router.close()
  return contents[0]

def getipaddress(html=None):
  if not html:
    return ""
  match=re.search(r'WAN.+?IP Address.+?([0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+)',
html)
  return match.group(1)

def writetolog(IPAddress, logfile="C:\\IPAddress.log"):
  fp=open(logfile, 'a')
  fp.write(IPAddress)
  fp.write("\n")
  fp.close()

p=getstatuspage()
if p:
  i=getipaddress(p)
  if i:
    writetolog(i)