From: Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@...>
Date: 2006-07-12T05:21:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Running windows ruby, and watir under wine on linux?

On 7/11/06, Ezra Zygmuntowicz <ezmobius@gmail.com> wrote:
> Friends-
>
>         I have seen a few blog posts where folks mention that they have
> gotten the ruby  one click installer and watir/IE running under wine
> on linux. Has anyone out there done this successfully? My company
> would be willing to pay someone to help us get this up and running.
> Anyone have any tips or any more information about making this kind
> of thing happen?
>
>         We are using watir as a web scraper tool of sorts for scraping
> crusty sites that use multiple  framesets and java applets and all
> kinds of other horrible stuff that defies any type of regular screen
> scraping short of using watir to actually navigate the sites and
> enter data into forms to get results we need from these companies
> sites. And we need multiple instances of watir driving the same
> companies site at once which is problematic because internet explorer
> overwrites its cookies when more then one of these scrapes is run
> against the same website at once. So we are trying to experiment with
> running watir under wine so each scaper runs in its own env and
> doesn't step on each others cookies.
>
>         Any win32 gurus have any ideas as to how we might be able to
> dynamically from our ruby/watir scripts, manage the cookies written
> by IE so we could control where they get written and be able to run
> two or more concurrent scrapes of the same website via watir without
> IE overwriting the cookie it uses? My company is willing to pay
> someone to help solve this problem. Thoughts or ideas are very
> welcome at this point. I have asked this same thing eslewhere but I
> know there are many smart folks on this list and I hope someone might
> have an idea to help us out. More info available if you need it.
>
>
> Thanks-
> -Ezra
>
>

You could try runas
(http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/runas.mspx)
to run multiple Watir (and hence automated IE) processes as different
users, which would put the cookies in separates profiles.

Wouldn't work if you're trying to run multiple IE processes via
separate Ruby threads though.

Regards,
Sean