Applescript/Telnet Help

..works beautifully, but instead of "delay", can it be like "Wait for password:"?

If you don't want to use some shell tool such as expect you can interactively query the state of the window to see what it's saying, e.g.:

...
do script "telnet 192.168.1.1" in front window
repeat until (last word of (contents of front window as text) = "password")
delay 1
end repeat
do script "passwordhere" in front window
...

In this way the script is testing the last word in the window text to determine if it's the prompt you expect. You'll need to play around with the settings to get the right word (e.g. you might need 'word -2' if the prompt says 'password:' since 'password' and ':' would be considered two 'words' as far as AppleScript is concerned).

You should also be aware that using 'front window' is prone to errors should the window focus change mid-stream (e.g. you open a new terminal window while waiting for the router to respond). This may or may not be a big problem depending on your setup.

You'll have to choose a language other than AppleScript if you want to do things like this reliably.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2065.html#TNTAG5

"Q: How do I control an interactive tool like ftp or telnet with do shell script?

A: The short answer is that you don’t. do shell script is designed to start the command and then let it run with no interaction until it completes, much like the backquote operator in Perl and most Unix shells.

However, there are ways around this. You can script Terminal and send a series of commands to the same window (though this only works in Mac OS X 10.2 and later), or you could use a Unix package designed for scripting interactive tools, such as expect. Also, many interactive commands have non-interactive equivalents. For example, curl can substitute for ftp in most cases."

I added a line in repeat to retry connecting until it gets the password prompt:

I don't see the point in doing this. Either you're going to connect or you're not. If you're not then the problem is a general network problem (e.g. you can't get to the router from where you are), so trying multiple times isn't going to make that any more likely. There's no harm in doing it, I guess, but it doesn't add any extra value to the script.

Can't we without "front window" so the process is not interrupted by other apps?

Yes - what you have to do is keep track of the window the first command is issued in.
What I tend to do is issue the first command without a target window (this opens a new window), then I grab that window's ID and use it as the target for all future commands. e.g.:

tell application "Terminal"
do script "telnet 192.168.1.1" -- this opens a new window
set wID to ID of front window -- grab the new window's ID
repeat until (last word of (contents of window id wID as text) = "password")
delay 1
end repeat
do script "mypassword" in window id wID
...

In this way you can do whatever you like - switch windows, open new ones, etc. and the script will still target the right one (as long as you don't close that, of course).

...but I'm not sure how to set a timeout of say 120 secs?

I assume you mean for the initial connection? Just keep a counter of how many times you've iterated through the repeat loop:

...
set loopCount to 0
repeat until (last word of (contents of window id wID as text) = "password")
set loopCount to loopCount + 1 -- increment the counter
if loopCount = 120 then error -128 -- if we've been here 120 times, cancel the script execution
delay 1
end repeat

How'd I stop the script after it says "Reboot Failed"?

You can either call:

return

which tells your script to exit the current handler (or quit if you're in the run handler), or you can:

error -128

which initiates a 'user cancelled' response (has the same basic effect, but may be 'more' correct since it indicates that the script did not compete normally).

The only part that's wrong here is the line:

if loopCount = 5 then return (say "reboot failed") quit

which may be a formatting error on the boards, or it may be how you entered the script.

Normally I'd just say:

if loopCount = 5 then
say "reboot failed"
return
end if

If you use the command 'quit', it will tell Terminal.app to quit, which may or may not be what you want.