I want to create an easy UI for my wife to enable and disable firewall rules to give her control over the kids wifi when I'm not there.
I can see that there is an aa & ab &SSLGroup fields for login and that an authtoken called sFormAuthStr is returned, but the payload for, say enabling or disabling a firewall rule isn't clear as there is both and ipfeds.cgi file and an associated .sht file which seems to contain the rules for the entire page.

You can use the CLI ipf <ruleset> <rulenumber> -e 0|1 (enable / disable), however when I try to automate an ssh login I can login but it seems to login sometimes but fails the exec.

so, seem to be a bit stuck on how I can make an easy interface for my wife to enable / diasble internet access for the kids - any ideas please?

I've successfully automated Telnet scripting of my Vigor 2860 in the past. I just tried it with your requirement and got it to work.

However - your mention of SSH, makes me think you may be a 'unix' type ... ... and the tool I use is for Windows. (Alternatives are bound to exist for the *nix world)

The website for the tool I use is no longer available, but the 'Wayback machine' successfully archived it (in 1998 ... the copy on my system is dated 1997 )
See: https://web.archive.org/web/19990129004722fw_/http://www.er.uqam.ca/merlin/fg591543/tst/

Command:

Code:

tst10 /r:router.scp /o:temp.txt

where router.scp contains:-

Code:

Routername 23 wait "Account:" send "admin\m" wait "Password:" send "topsecret\m" wait "MyRouterPrompt>" send "ipf rule 1 1 -e 1\m" wait "MyRouterPrompt>" send "quit\m"

Output (in temp.txt)

Code:

Account: Account:admin admin Password: topsecret_password_unfortunately_gets_echoed! ********* User login successful, expired time is "Unlimited". Type ? for command help MyRouterPrompt> ipf rule 1 1 -e 1 ipf rule 1 1 -e 1 Setting saved. MyRouterPrompt> quit

Putty might well do this....

https://itectec.com/superuser/how-to-run-a-remote-command-in-putty-after-login-keep-the-shell-running/