On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Charles Jones <jonescr at cisco.com> wrote:

Henrik,

I'm talking about the connection protocol, not the message protocol. So that I can write code that can connect to a BBDISPLAY and send/receive data, without shelling out and using a bb binary. I've tried telnetting to port 1984 and typing various commands, and also using netcat, none of which seem to work, so I suspect that hobbitd is expecting to see some certain characters before it will accept a command.

-Charles

Would bb.pl be of any use to you?? As found on deadcat.net:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

bb.pl

BIG BROTHER CLIENT PROGRAM

Nicolas Chuche <chuche at teaser.fr>

Version 1

Jul 15, 2000

This program is a remake of bb.c in perl.

I've do that to :

1. have a real client for my NT servers

2. see what it done in perl

I've tried to have full compatibility so i've keep all the error

messages.

If you want to use it, just replace the original bb by this file in

BBHOME/bin

The header of bb.c :

SENDS THE INPUT LINE TO THE DAEMON ON THE BIG BROTHER PORT

Format: bb IP-ADDR [<LINE>|-]

IP-ADDR: IP-ADDR OF THE SERVER

LINE: <page|status|summary> <DATA>

DATA: for page: <NUMERIC MESSAGE><status-msg>

for status: <machine><color-code><status-msg>

fro summary: <summary name><color-code><http link>

- Will read from standard input a one line status

message.

use strict; use Socket;

my $PORT = 1984; # The bbd port my $PAGELEVELSDEFAULT = "red purple"; # the default page level my $MAXBBLINE = 256; # the max input line length

sub debug { print STDERR shift;}; # debug message : uncomment

this line sub debug {}; # and comment this one

@ARGV == 2 or &Usage; my ($server, $line) = @ARGV or &Usage;

take the standart input if second arg is "-"

if ($line eq '-') { debug("bb gets its input from stdin\n"); while (<STDIN>) { chomp; $_ = substr($_, 0, $MAXBBLINE - 1); debug("data came in [$_]\n"); bb_notify($server, $_); } debug("Done\n"); } else { bb_notify($server, $line); }

exit(0);

sub bb_notify { my ($machine, $data) = @_; my (@bbdisplays, @bbpagers, $bbpage, $pagelevels) = ();

@bbdisplays = split /\s+/, $ENV{BBDISPLAYS} if defined $ENV{BBDISPLAYS}; debug("Sending: ** $data ** to $machine - @bbdisplays\n"); bb_send($machine, \@bbdisplays, $data);

$bbpage = $ENV{BBPAGE};# if defined $ENV{BBPAGE}; $pagelevels = ((defined $ENV{PAGELEVELS}) && $ENV{PAGELEVELS}) ? $ENV{PAGELEVELS} : $PAGELEVELSDEFAULT;

paging or not paging ?

if( $bbpage && $pagelevels ) { my ($type, $machine, $color, $message) = $data =~ /^(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(.*)$/;

debug("v1:[$type] v2:[$machine] v3:[$color] v4:[$message]\n");

if ($type =~ /status/ && $pagelevels =~ /$color/) {
  $data =~ s/^(\s*status\S*\s+)/page /;                # Change msg type
  @bbpagers   = split /\s+/, $ENV{BBPAGERS} if defined $ENV{BBPAGERS};
  debug("Sending: ** $data ** to $bbpage - @bbpagers\n");
  bb_send($bbpage,\@bbpagers,$data);    # SEND IT ACROSS TO BBPAGER
}

} }

Send a message

sub bb_send { my ($bbdisp, $machinelist, $message) = @_; my (%machine, @machinelist) = ();

@machinelist = ($bbdisp ne "0.0.0.0") ? ($bbdisp) : @$machinelist;

debug("BOX: $bbdisp\nBOXES: @machinelist\n");

for my $server (@machinelist) { my ($port, $iaddr, $paddr, $proto); # Variable réseau

# don't send the message twice to the same machine
next if $machine{$server};
$machine{$server} = 1;

debug("Host: $server\n");

$iaddr   = inet_aton($server)              || warn "bb: Unknown host:

$server\n", next; $paddr = sockaddr_in($PORT, $iaddr); $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');

socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto) || warn "bb: Can't open

stream socket\n", next; connect(SOCK, $paddr) || warn "bb: CAN'T CONNECT TO bbd SERVER @ $server", next; # select((select(SOCK), $| = 1)[0]); # unbuffer the socket print SOCK $message; close (SOCK); } debug("Host list done\n"); }

Print usage

sub Usage { print STDERR <<EOF; bb: incorrect number of arguments Format: <IP-ADDR> <DATA> EOF exit(1); }

Ralph Mitchell