[Tutor] Figuring out a protocol for fun and education

[Terry Carroll]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Scot W. Stevenson wrote:

> 
> HOST = '192.168.1.20'
> SOCKET = 3185

> (Note this is Python 2.3). The first time I send something -- anything -- I 
> get "SuSE Meta pppd (smpppd), Version 1.00" as a response, which proves that 
> I'm reaching the right socket etc. However, anything after that is met with 
> silence until the time out is reached.

I find a nice way to play with this is to telnet to it, e.g.:

 telnet 192.1681.20 3185

and try your commands.

However, my guess is that the smpppd is not designed to be interrogated, 
and probably just is silent on unexpected input.  I'd cheat at least a 
little and look at the source code to the other implementations you have 
available; or at least the code to smpppd itself.

A lot of servers like to see two consecutive returns to end a command; 
you might want to try that.

> Since this is getting frustrating, I'm wondering about creating a transparent 
> proxy instead, that I would do nothing more than pass along the stuff it 
> receives from cinternet to smpppd and vice versa while printing out a log of 
> what it is doing. Haven't gotten around to coding it yet, though.

I think you'd find that telnet would do this sort of thing for you.

I can appreciate your frustration.  In a prior career, I was a computer 
architect for a company that made IBM-compatible mainframes, and I had the 
frequent task of trying things on the IBM we had, to try to figure out what 
sequences made it jump through this or that hoop, so we could do the same.

-- 
Terry Carroll
Santa Clara, CA
carroll at tjc.com
Modell delendus est