WWW::Mechanize suddenly can't see https webpage - perl

Question

I have a perl script that uses WWW::Mechanize to open a SSL connection to our single sign-on page to test connectivity for Nagios. Yesterday, that script stopped working, and I have no idea why. Here is a snippet of the debug of that script:
main::(./check_profiles.pl:13): $auth_url = "https://account.example.com/SSO/index.html";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:14): $profile_url = "https://example.com/prof";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:16): $user = "nagios\#heyyou.com";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:17): $pass = "testing123";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:18): $expected_string = "Bunnies";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:21): $digest_username = "user";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:22): $digest_password = "pass";
main::(./check_profiles.pl:25): $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( agent=>"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4" );
main::(./check_profiles.pl:28): $mech->credentials("example.com/prof:443","Nokia", $digest_username=>$digest_password);
main::(./check_profiles.pl:31): $mech->add_handler("request_send", sub { shift->dump; return });
main::(./check_profiles.pl:32): $mech->add_handler("response_done", sub { shift->dump; return });
main::(./check_profiles.pl:35): $mech->get( $auth_url );
GET https://account.example.com/SSO/index.html
Accept-Encoding: gzip
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
(no content)
500 Can't connect to account.example.com:443 (connect: Network is unreachable)
Content-Type: text/plain
Client-Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 16:16:25 GMT
Client-Warning: Internal response
500 Can't connect to account.example.com:443 (connect: Network is unreachable)\n
Error GETing https://account.example.com/SSO/index.html: Can't connect to account.example.com:443 (connect: Network is unreachable) at ./check_profiles.pl line 35
at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 2747
WWW::Mechanize::_die('Error ', 'GET', 'ing ', 'URI::https=SCALAR(0x3291d40)', ': ', 'Can\'t connect to account.example.com:443 (connect: Network is ...') called at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 2734
WWW::Mechanize::die('WWW::Mechanize=HASH(0x31ce490)', 'Error ', 'GET', 'ing ', 'URI::https=SCALAR(0x3291d40)', ': ', 'Can\'t connect to account.example.com:443 (connect: Network is ...') called at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 2383
WWW::Mechanize::_update_page('WWW::Mechanize=HASH(0x31ce490)', 'HTTP::Request=HASH(0x330f490)', 'HTTP::Response=HASH(0x3489c28)') called at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 2213
WWW::Mechanize::request('WWW::Mechanize=HASH(0x31ce490)', 'HTTP::Request=HASH(0x330f490)') called at /usr/share/perl5/LWP/UserAgent.pm line 387
LWP::UserAgent::get('WWW::Mechanize=HASH(0x31ce490)', 'https://account.example.com/SSO/index.html') called at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/WWW/Mechanize.pm line 407
WWW::Mechanize::get('WWW::Mechanize=HASH(0x31ce490)', 'https://account.example.com/SSO/index.html') called at ./check_profiles.pl line 35
As you can see, WWW::Mechanize believes that there is no 443 access to account.example.com, however this is not true. If it were true, my entire app would break, and it is working fine. This is further proof:
> telnet account.example.com 443
Trying 2.2.2.2...
Connected to account.example.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
I have no idea why this is happening. Can anyone determine the problem based on the debug info, or offer any further help? Thanks!

Answer 1

WWW::Mechanize was at 1.66-1.
Upgraded to 1.72-1, problem went away.

Answer 2

Most likely they kick you because of 'haxor' "User agent" string. Thy something like this before your get:
my $initial_user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; de-de; HTC Desire HD 1.18.161.2 Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1';
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new( agent => $initial_user_agent );