I am a student at NUS (http://www.nus.edu.sg) The university has a strange network policy. No matter if students are active online or not, they get disconnected from the network every 30 minutes and have to relog-on using a web site provided by the university ( http://spnp.nus.edu.sg ) . I wish to write an application to keep the connection alive.

I was thinking about a telnet client into the site and POSTing the information (ie. my username and password) to the site. My questions are as follow:

1. I realised that the page was cgi-bin/login.py. What is a .py page ? just a script page ? will this require me to program the app differently ?

2. What is the HTTP command to post data (i.e. my username and password) and what is the format ?

3. What is the best way to achieve a connection to the server ? winsock ?

3. There is also a HTTPS site which I would prefer to code my application for. Anyone has any idea how to achieve this ?

I would really really appreciate any help! Thanks!

Harold Soh