Is http://quest.bb4.com/bb/help/help/Status_Message_Format.htm what your after.

Regards

Graeme

From: Charles Jones [mailto:jonescr at cisco.com] Sent: Friday, 21 March 2008 4:30 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] bb cmd protocol? (was [hobbit] Windows version of a fully functional bb command)

Speaking of such, is the protocol for the bb command published anywhere? It would be handy if I could write my own function for it in perl and other languages that I am writing hobbit scripts in. I'm guessing it's not as simple as just making a tcp connection to the port and sending the command.

-Charles

From: Etienne Grignon [mailto:etienne.grignon at gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 10:39 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Windows version of a fully functional bb command

Hi,

2008/3/14, White, Bruce <bewhite at fellowes.com>:

Hi all,

I know I saw a thread earlier about a fully functional bb for windows and that someone had ported the hobbit bb code to windows and got it working. I, for the life of me, can not now find that thread. I'm interested in a windows bb executable so I can write a quick DOS bat file that my windows guys can run to place a windows server into maintenance mode. Anybody have a windows bb executable and/or such a script?

You can use the bbwincmd.exe utility which is installed with BBWin. It is a cmd command line utility to send messages to hobbit server almost like the original bb command and your don't need cygwin.

Regards,

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On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:29:40AM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:

Speaking of such, is the protocol for the bb command published anywhere?

See the bb(1) man-page.

Henrik

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

The description of the "Message Syntax" in the man-page is what you need to know. Hobbit uses plain TCP, and data being transferred is plain text. I.e.

• connect to tcp port 1984
• send "status www,foo,com.mytest green"
• close the connection

Regards, Henrik

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 03:43:10PM -0700, Charles Jones 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

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

...

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:29:40AM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:

...

Speaking of such, is the protocol for the bb command published anywhere?

See the bb(1) man-page.