@<1523701435869433856:profile|SmugDolphin23> thanks for good pointers

it did not work on first attempt - requests did not validated the certs right
I have added this:

token_req = requests.get(api_server + "/auth.login", verify="<my_org_CA>", auth=(access_key, secret_key))``` 
print(token_req)

I got back

<Response [200]>

which I believe is good right?

when adding
token = token_req.json()["data"]["token"]

I got errors from json decoder, which I believe is expected?

requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)