Password-free "v5" login for PrimeNet

[Artoria2e5]

The password login is apparently a relic of the manual submission form: I don't think I was asked to give one for AutoPrimeNet and it certainly does not store one in the config. There is a string "The legacy manual testing feature was deprecated and has been removed from this program" in APN but I cannot find what exactly has changed easily: it was there since the initial commit of APN.

What I can provide is a very surface-level description of the current protocol used in APN from the code it has: It now uses some persistent state in the form of a bunch of GUIDs. See https://github.com/tdulcet/AutoPrimeNet/blob/4612bcf47c50abd4848c4484aba0df0808838b81/autoprimenet.py#L3593. At least the ComputerGUID is persistent and needs to be kept. The GUID is used in secure_v5_url.

The requirement for a persistent GUID is not going to work too well with how -config currently works (an optional text file). Perhaps make it such that a certain filename is used by default?

[tdulcet]

in APN but I cannot find what exactly has changed easily: it was there since the initial commit of APN

You would need to look at the previous repository. See this commit specifically: tdulcet/Distributed-Computing-Scripts@6b0afd1. In short, various old versions of the PrimeNet script were simply wrappers around the legacy manual testing pages and required providing a password. The PrimeNet program (before AutoPrimeNet) switched to using PrimeNet v5 API, the same as Prime95/MPrime does, but kept that legacy functionally for unsupported GIMPS programs. This was finally removed with the release of AutoPrimeNet 1.0, which is now designed to support all third party GIMPS programs.

As with those scripts, PrMers also wraps the manual assignment pages, which is why it still requires a password. These pages are deprecated and could break at any time. PrMers could switch to using the v5 API directly, but note that it is complex. AutoPrimeNet is over 9,000 lines of code, most of which is interacting with the API. See the official documentation for more information, although it is very outdated, so you would also need to look at the Prime95/MPrime source code.

Instead, I would recommend that we add support for PrMers to AutoPrimeNet, which would be much easier and provide many additional features to users. AutoPrimeNet should already support getting assignments, reporting results and uploading proof files for PrMers (and other PrimeNet functionally such as reserving individual exponents, recovering assignments, unreserving assignments, etc.) as of version 1.1, so we would just need to add support for parsing the PrMers savefiles to report assignment progress.

CC: @JamesHeinrich