Home » Forums » screen-scraper » screen-scraper public support

"Peer Not Authenticated" Error - what to tell IT?

Hi all,

I'm developing a pretty simple scrape at work (SS 5.5) that harvests an application number from a first webpage, processes the number's format slightly to adjust it for a second website, and then loads a page from the second website using the adjusted application number.

However, when I try to access the second website with the adjusted application, I get the following error:

An input/output error occurred while connecting to 'https:// ... blah blah ...'. The message was peer not authenticated.

Because this error message looked fishy, I decided to try the scrape from my home installation (SS 6.0) and it worked fine w/no errors. Since the scrape is so simple that I don't think the different SS versions would trip it up, the error message seems to indicate there is something in our law firm's firewall or network that the second website doesn't like.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what/where this problem might be? I have a good relationship with our firm's IT group (I write their docs), but I would like to give them a better idea of what the problem might be and/or where to look than "This website doesn't get through the firewall...WTF?!?"

Thanks for any help/advice you can give in advance and have a great day!

Regards,
Justin

‹ SS script backup & import: unicode characters aren't handled properly? Looping a script ›
Justin_S on 02/27/2013 at 10:16 am

Actually it was because

Actually it was because screen-scraper wasn't chaining proxies correctly, and the fix was to upgrade to version 6.0 (or newer). Is there a reason you must use 5.5?

 jason on 02/27/2013 at 4:43 pm

Actually it's occurring in SS 6.0 too when run on our network

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the info - I'll update my local workstation ASAP.

That said, I do have an installation of SS 6.0 running in a VM on our network: I set up and retested this scrape on this VM, but it gave me the same error unfortunately. Since running this scrape outside of our network (i.e., at home) still works, I suspect the difference has something to do with our firm's firewall.

Any ideas as to what to look for?

Regards,
Justin

 Justin_S on 03/05/2013 at 7:25 am

You might need to configure

You might need to configure the proxy in the screen-scraper settings > external proxy. Aside from that, you might need IT to grant application-level permissions.

 jason on 03/05/2013 at 10:53 am

Just to follow up

I worked with IT for an hour yesterday to fix this. Just for the record, the problem wasn't the firewall - it had something to do with Microsoft's ForeFront client, the use of data compression and the HTTPS protocol being used to communicate with one of the sites. Once ForeFront was disabled and the scrape was given direct access to the proxy server (via the Advanced tab), it started to work fine.

 Justin_S on 03/08/2013 at 8:17 am

I worked for Microsoft

I worked for Microsoft support for a few years, and I never would have thought of that.

 jason on 03/08/2013 at 9:52 am