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Question

WWW Card – Difficulty with Authentication

  • October 13, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 55 views
W

I have a Solarwinds site that I cannot access using WWW cards.
The typical Authentication built into the WWW Card does not work.
And I have tried embedding the username in the URL the two ways I know how:
    https://www.{hostname}?username={name}&password={pass}

(*USERNAME= and PASSWORD=  change from site to site. You will need to look at the ‘Elements’ with ‘Developer tools’ to find the actual element IDs.)

And

    https://{username}:{password}@{hostname}


The cards do not display any error codes to help me troubleshoot.
(A checkbox with “Show all the ugly errors for troubleshooting” option would be nice)

Has anyone found a solution?  Or maybe a way to troubleshoot?

1 reply

W
  • WKK_Mike
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • October 16, 2025

SOLVED!
  The answer was something I should have seen right away.  It has been years since I had to write HTTP code to pass data between the browser and the server through a URL.   But back then I knew that some characters had special meanings.

In the problem I was facing, the system would not log into the webpage.  I tried the normal authentication on the WEB CARD, and the TWO URL based examples I provided.   All failed.

Then I tried the first Embedded URL, but I encoded the special characters.  Let’s say the password was ABC#123%BLUE$
All the special characters have a meaning when in a URL.    They need to be encoded to prevent a webserver from trying to act on them as special codes.

When I encoded the special characters the WEB CARD was finally able to log into the site.

The example password would look like this once encoded:  ABC%23123%25BLUE%24
The “%23123” are looks like it might get confused.  But the escape encoding is in Hex and only uses two digits after the “%” symbol.
The”123” part does not get confused with the escaped character “%23”
 

Some characters are designated as "reserved" (like $, +, ,, ;, /, ?, :, @, =, &) because they are used for specific purposes. Other characters, including spaces and characters like " , <, >, and #, are considered "unsafe" and must be encoded to prevent misinterpretation. 

 

Character

URL Escape Codes

String Literal Escape Code

SPACE

%20

$20

< 

%3C

$3C

> 

%3E

$3E

#

%23

$23

%

%25

$25

+

%2B

$2B

{

%7B

$7B

}

%7D

$7D

|

%7C

$7C

\

%5C

$5C

^

%5E

$5E

~

%7E

$7E

[

%5B

$5B

]

%5D

$5D

‘

%60

$60

;

%3B

$3B

/

%2F

$2F

?

%3F

$3F

:

%3A

$3A

@

%40

$40

=

%3D

$3D

&

%26

$26

$

%24

$24


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