News & Commentary: 2005-02-20

Getting Saint George Internet Banking Working with Firefox and Linux (RedHat Fedora)

Baah! Why do these guys have to make it difficult? Well I had to be told how to get it to work so I might as well tell other people...

Step 1 -- Choose Your Firefox

Fedora 3 comes with Firefox already but it isn't the latest version, it might work but I would suggest getting the latest version.

Start here at Mozilla and follow the links to the download. I downloaded the file "firefox-1.0.installer.tar.gz" and found the installer pretty easy to use (I installed as root, into /usr/local/firefox).

Step 2 -- Choose Your Java Virtual Machine

Sun now explicitly supports Linux these days (shows how desperate they are to get anyone and everyone using Java)_ Here is Sun's Java site and here is the download page for J2SE 1.4.2. I found that only the "JRE" was required and I downloaded the file "j2re-1_4_2_07-linux-i586-rpm.bin" which is a self extracting archive. You need these commands (as root):

# chmod +x j2re-1_4_2_07-linux-i586-rpm.bin
# ./j2re-1_4_2_07-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Then it gives you an RPM file which you can install. All that stupid licensing stuff makes you realise that you don't want to use Java for anything that you don't HAVE to. Anyhow, after the JVM is installed, firefox still won't recognise it until do this symbolic link (also as root):

# ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_07/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/local/firefox/plugins/

Now you should have a working JVM available from within the firefox web browser. That's a step in the right direction.

Step 3 -- Wrangle With Saint George Crappy Javascript

You would think that firefox is popular enough by now that the above would be sufficient. I mean, even your die hard Microsoft lover has heard of firefox by now... it's in the news at least once a month. Sadly if you go and visit the demonstration banking page you will get a blank screen when you start the demonstration. Checking the javascript console gives this result:

Error: document.bhjvmd.getJavaVendor is not a function
Source File: https://ibank.stgeorge.com.au/html/redirect.asp?demo=true&orc=personal

So it is trying to do some automagical autodetect and in the process is calling some non standard function and shooting itself in the foot. But all is not lost, seems that there are layers of automagic at work here and it also triggers on the browser ID string.

Step 4 -- Pretend to be a Different Browser

There is a very handy little utility that works as a plugin for firefox which is The User Agent Switcher from Mozilla's Extension Room. You will need this utility. I found that it required that I installed it NOT as root but as the user that I use to access my banking. You have to enable the ability to load and install plugins before you can get this to work. You will know when you got it right because a "User Agent Switcher" submenu will appear at the bottom of the "Tools" menu.

When using StGeorge Internet Banking, you need to set the User Agent Switcher position to "Opera 7.54 (Windows XP)" which annoyingly causes the Main StGeorge page to tell you what a crappy browser you are using (sticks and stones will break my bones, but I don't give a shit what you think of my browser) and offer to help you download Internet Explorer (better known by the common usage name "Microsoft Virus Portal", hey these banks keep telling me that they take security seriously).

Step 5 -- Unblock Pop-ups

That's right, the Internet Banking requires that you have pop-ups enabled so you have to go to "Edit" menu then "Preferences" submenu then "Web Features" tab then of course you have popups blocked so add "ibank.stgeorge.com.au" into the list of "Allowed Sites".

If you don't have that enabled then you will get a warning line across the top of the screen saying that a popup has been blocked BUT the warning won't stay from more than a second because the javascript forces a reload that hides the warning again (genius huh?). Thus, firefox would normally give your an easy method to unblock the pop-up when you need to but Saint George in their wisdom have found a way to disable that.

Step 6 -- Now Try the Demo Link

As listed above... it should work correctly. If you get the demo working then you have a reasonable chance of getting your own account to work. Don't forget that you need to register for phone banking and get yourself a password and all that crap.

Does this have anything to do with news commentary?

No, no it doesn't. The fact that I spent a large part of today struggling with this stuff means I didn't get a chance to read the news!

UPDATE 2006-12-13: The above totally out of date!

St Greoge Bank now uses a completely different banking system, it is not Java-based anymore. The whole layout is different.

The output formats for you account statements are different (and there's no way to get the original formats so all those people who carefully setup parsers to load the original format into a database have to start over). The new output format is actually better BTW, it's just that change without compatibility support is a pain in the arse... no one asked me if I thought it was a good idea. I just PAY for the dang thing!

IMHO, the new page layout is worse that the old Java based system and the actions are clunkier and the whole process is harder to use. On the other hand, it is probably easier to make the new system work with Linux, so that's a small plus (but the old system worked anyhow).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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