Background
All of the web pages and scripts that TIM Plus serves are protected by a login that is provided by a user when entering their username and password into a pop-up dialog presented by their web browser.
In some situations, it is desirable to suppress this dialog box demanding the username and password. An example might be the deployment of a stand-alone computer displaying a pre-defined wallboard on a large screen; it would become tedious having to log in to the web page every time that computer is restarted.
Different web browsers behave differently when asked to automatically log in to web sites. Variously, they range from complete prohibition of the practise to permitting it only if certain system parameters are configured.
e.g. Chrome + Firefox have plugins that allow auto login :-
Chrome - Auto Login
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-login/kjdgohfkopafhjmmlbojhaabfpndllgk?hl=en
Firefox - Auto Auth
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/autoauth/
Specifics
In this article, details of how to allow automatic logging-in to a web page concerns the Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 6 and above) browsers only. Please consult your browser documentation for a solution related to your own choice of browser.
The solution involves creating a specially-crafted URL in the following form:
Solution
Although including the username and password in a URL is disabled by default on Windows Internet Explorer since it is considered a security risk, you can override this restriction by making the following changes to the Windows Registry.
 | Since you'll be exposing a username and password as part of a URL, it is recommended that you create a dedicated web user object inside the TIM Plus directory that will be used solely for this purpose. See the Web users page for details of how to set up a web user. |
Open Windows Registry Editor, REGEDIT.EXE, from the Windows Start Menu and locate the following registry key:
- for a 32-bit system:
- for a 64-bit system:
Inside this registry key, add the following DWORD entries:
Close the Registry Editor and create a bookmark in Internet Explorer, specifying the URL as per the following example:
Replace the following entries:
- USERNAME replace with the username of the web user you use to access the page
- PASSWORD replace with the password of the web user you use to access the page
- HOSTNAME replace with the host name or IP address of the machine running TIM Plus
Updates
Microsoft has removed the ability to auto login using regedit. They've patched it :-
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securitybulletins/2004/ms04-040
(As with the previous Internet Explorer Cumulative Security Update, MS04-004, this update prevents you from visiting Web sites that have "username:[email protected]" URLs for XMLHTTP. We have created an update to MSXML that addresses this issue specifically for XMLHTTP. For more information, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 832414.)