Howto: Mirroring a site that uses cookies which expire at the end of a session

• Open your browser to the apropriate page and login
• Sniff session while loading random pages from the site in the browser
• Leave broswer open to the site
• Stop sniffing the data, and analyze the dump from the site, find and copy the Cookie string
• With wget you add –header “Cookie: cookiename=data; secondcookiename=data” http://username:password@site to the options.
• make sure that you start mirroring from inside the site, ie: beyond the login page.

In my case the final wget string looked like this:

wget –mirror –convert-links –page-requisites –html-extension –cookies=off –header “Cookie:ABC%2ESession=YcnpPdnqLFCfYA6p%2DITgU84eRUVSrKV30; ASPSESSIONIDCCSTCRTT=GCCLDPDDKDIACCHE” http://username:password@site

Note that most of the cookie data has been deleted to keep this example brief.