Sunday, April 3, 2011

Indian Railway Ticket Booking with firebug

[Update: Indian railway site started disabling quick book form from 7:45 am to 9:00 am. I am thinking how to hack this level of corruption now ]

Many of you will be familiar with the Indian Railway Ticket booking site https://www.irctc.co.in/ . Booking opens at 8AM everyday and irctc servers are not enough to take to load of users, therefore most of the users starts getting time-out from website and they dont get the booking form page from the irctc servers. What i have tried is, made booking form ready before 8AM and just pressed submit button at 8:00:01 AM within seconds i was redirected to payment banking site as i was using net banking for payment.


Here is the Trick

* Match your watch with the IRCTC server time.
* Fill up the form before 8am.
* use firebug plugin to edit two variables, so that server understands form is filled after 8am.
* Hit enter on keyboard as soon as your watch shows 8 am. you will be redirected to payment gateway.


[firebug edit]

click on quick book link on irctc website. fill up the complete form.
use firebug and edit quick book button .. html for quick book will be something

<input type="submit" class="buttonSubmit" 
onclick="return incrementClicks('7');" value="Quick Book" 
name="Submit">

u have to change value inside incrementClicks... and set it to 8.. if you are opening form in your browser after 7am and before 8 am this value will be 7.

If you want to check availability you can do similar edit on show availability button on the form
<input class="buttonSubmit" name="avail" 
onclick="return openAvailabilityWin('7');" type="button" 
value="Show Availability " />


[I had booked tatkal two times for my friend similar way, don't fill up your form too early your login session may get expired, better start at 7:45am]