Siemens S7-1200 PLC LED DI/DO History - plc

Is there a way to review the Digital Input/Digital Output LED light history of a Siemens S7-1200 PLC?
If so, is it through the web portal or through Simatic and can someone point me in the direction of where to find such information?
Thanks - will save me a site visit if possible in any way.

There is no built in DI/DQ history for the S7-1200.
However, if you have some form of TCP/IP connection, this can be done quite easily.
When you call outputs in your main program, use a tag based calling system. Reference that tag, and have the tag's output be:
The required DQ
A TCP/IP message saying that this tag has risen or fallen.
For inputs, just send a message on the rise and fall of each input
It is likely easiest to hold this DI/DQ history on the server that is hosting this TCP/IP connection rather than the PLC itself.

Related

How to find out how to communicate with a network device

i have a question to a network specialist.
So I have a network device, its a Sky Q receiver.
I found a nodejs plugin which sends Buffers to the device to communicate with it.
To be clear I am able to send remote commands just like using the remote control.
For example he sends a Buffer containing:
var commandBytes = [4,1,0,0,0,0,Math.floor(224 + button / 16),button % 16]
where button is a command for example 0 is power.
So my question is, this guy found out how to communicate with this receiver.
Is there a general way how to find out how you can communicate and send commands to a network device?
I tried sniffing everything I can with Wireshark when i start a socket connection to the device I receive a buffer.
Probably my question can't be answered that easy but I wanted to give it a try.
The main point, why im asking stack overflow-community about this is, I have do not a starting point how to ask google this question.
Thank you very much,

low connectivity protocols or technologies

I'm trying to enhance a server-app-website architecture in reliability, another programmer has developed.
At the moment, android smartphones start a tcp connection to a server component to exchange data. The server takes the data, writes them into a DB and another user can have a look on the data through a website. The problem is that the smartphones very regularly are in locations where connectivity is really bad. The consequence is that the smartphones lose the tcp connection and it's hard to reconnect. Now my question is, if there are any protocols that are so lightweight or accomodating concerning bad connectivity that the data exchange could work better or more reliable.
For example, I was thinking about replacing the raw TCP interface with a RESTful API, but I don't really know how well REST works in this scenario, as I don't have any experience in this area.
Maybe useful to know for answering this question: The server component is programmed in c#. The connecting components are android smartphones.
Please understand that I dont add some code to this question, because in my opinion its just a theoretically question.
Thank you in advance !
REST runs over HTTP which runs over TCP so it would have the same issues with connectivity.
Moving up the stack to the application you could perhaps think in terms of 'interference'. I quite often have to use technical stuff in remote areas with limited reception and it reminds of trying to communicate in a storm. If you think about it, if you're trying to get someone to do something in a storm where they can hardly hear you and the words get blown away (dropped signal), you don't read them the manual on how to fix something, you shout key words such as 'handle', 'pull', 'pull', 'PULL', 'ok'. So the information reaches them in small bursts you can repeat (pull, what? pull, eh? PULL! oh righto!)
Can you redesign the communications between the android app and the server so the server can recognise key 'words' with corresponding data and build up the request over a period of time? If you consider idempotency, each burst of data would not alter the request if it has already been received (pull, PULL!) and over time the android app could send/receive smaller chunks of the request. If the signal stays up, just keep sending. If it goes down, note which parts of the request haven't been sent and retry them when the signal comes back.
So you're sending the request jigsaw-style but the server knows how to reassemble the pieces in the right order. A STOP word at the end tells the server ok this request is complete, go work on it. Until that word arrives the server can store the incomplete request or discard it if no more data comes in.
If the server respond to the first request chunk with an id, the app can use the id to get the response and keep trying until the full response comes back, at which point the server can remove the response from its jigsaw cache. A fair amount of work though.

open wifi Captive portal w/only local net (no internet/wan)?

I am trying to set up a wireless 'test' box to use on a private club (11,000 acres). The initial tests won't need anything fancy, it will just be checking the visibility of a hotspot from a high-point in the middle of the property. But if it proves to have good visibility, later tests will be (hopefully) promoted by the club and made aware to members. I would like to set up a captive portal to redirect them to a comments page where they can post a quick message if they were able to connect and hopefully say what they think about the idea.
This is going to be going on a raspberry pi running debian wheezy. So the less overhead the better.
Most of the examples I see online of captive portal are based on having an internet connection and/or a NAT scheme set up. I just need a hotspot and a single web-page for these promotional tests. If possible, I would like to trigger any devices capable to suggest or otherwise open a browser to go to the promotional landing page. It would also be nice if some kind of dns masquerading or other mechanism was in place to redirect all browser traffic in the event their device doesn't support a pop-up.
Any help is appreciated.
EDIT 2022/06/05: With further testing and packet sniffing, it turned out that the android versions in question hard code the ip of the google server used for the 'online check' (8.8.8.8). When on an arbitrary IP, it's not looking for requests to 8.8.8.8 and thus it doesn't grab the online-check and won't redirect. If you set the AP to use this address (when not internet connected), the pop-up will usually trigger.
However, this solution is not ideal. Hacking the IP stack to specifically grab that request to 8.8.8.8 is outside my wheelhouse of knowledge. If anyone knows how to do this or has another potential solution, I would be interested in hearing it.

Where would I learn more about interpreting network packets?

I'm working on a personal project. It's to recreate server software for the game "Chu Chu Rocket" for the Sega Dreamcast. Its' servers went down in 2004 I believe. My approach is to use dnsmasq to change the originl hostname that the game originally connected to, to my own system. With a DC-PC server set up, I have done just that, now instead of it looking up a non-existent dns record, it connects to my computer which will eventually run the server software. I've used tshark (cli wireshark) to capture what's going on between the client (dreamcast) and the server (my computer). The problem is, I'm getting data, but I'm not sure how to interpret it, I don't know what it's saying, but I'm sure it can be done because private PSO servers were created, those are far more complex.
Very simply, where would I go about learning how to interpret data packets, and possibly creating packets that will respond to such queries from the client?
Thanks,
Dragos240
If you can get the source code for the server software on your PC, then that is the best place to look.
Otherwise, all you can do is look at the protocol, compare runs, and make notes of similarities and differences. With any luck, the protocol won't be encrypted.

See what website the user is visiting in a browser independent way

I am trying to build an application that can inform a user about website specific information whenever they are visiting a website that is present in my database. This must be done in a browser independent way so the user will always see the information when visiting a website (no matter what browser or other tool he or she is using to visit the website).
My first (partially successful) approach was by looking at the data packets using the System.Net.Sockets.Socket class etc. Unfortunately I discoverd that this approach only works when the user has administrator rights. And of course, that is not what I want. My goal is that the user can install one relatively simple program that can be used right away.
After this I went looking for alternatives and found a lot about WinPcap and some of it's .NET wrappers (did I tell you I am programming c# .NET already?). But with WinPcap I found out that this must be installed on the user's pc and there is nog way to just reference some dll files and code away. I already looked at including WinPcap as a prerequisite in my installer but that is also to cumbersome.
Well, long story short. I want to know in my application what website my user is visiting at the moment it is happening. I think it must be done by looking at the data packets of the network but can't find a good solution for this. My application is build in C# .NET (4.0).
You could use Fiddler to monitor Internet traffic.
It is
a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.
It's scriptable and can be readily used from .NET.
One simple idea: Instead of monitoring the traffic directly, what about installing a browser extension that sends you the current url of the page. Then you can check if that url is in your database and optionally show the user a message using the browser extension.
This is how extensions like Invisible Hand work... It scans the current page and sends relevant data back to the server for processing. If it finds anything, it uses the browser extension framework to communicate those results back to the user. (Using an alert, or a bar across the top of the window, etc.)
for a good start, wireshark will do what you want.
you can specify a filter to isolate and view http streams.
best part is wireshark is open source, and built opon another program api, winpcap which is open source.
I'm guessing this is what you want.
capture network data off the wire
view the tcp traffic of a computer, isolate and save(in part or in hole) http data.
store information about the http connections
number 1 there is easy, you can google for a winpcap tutorial, or just use some of their sample programs to capture the data.
I recomend you study up on the pcap file format, everything with winpcap uses this basic format and its structers.
now you have to learn how to take a tcp stream and turn it into a solid data stream without curoption, or disorginized parts. (sorry for the spelling)
again, a very good example can be found in the wireshark source code.
then with your data stream, you can simple read the http format, and html data, or what ever your dealing with.
Hope that helps
If the user is cooperating, you could have them set their browser(s) to use a proxy service you provide. This would intercept all web traffic, do whatever you want with it (look up in your database, notify the user, etc), and then pass it on to the original location. Run the proxy on the local system, or on a remote system if that fits your case better.
If the user is not cooperating, or you don't want to make them change their browser settings, you could use one of the packet sniffing solutions, such as fiddler.
A simple stright forward way is to change the comupter DNS to point to your application.
this will cause all DNS traffic to pass though your app which can be sniffed and then redirected to the real DNS server.
it will also save you the hussel of filtering out emule/torrent traffic as it normally work with pure IP address (which also might be a problem as it can be circumvented by using IP address to browse).
-How to change windows DNS Servers
-DNS resolver
Another simple way is to configure (programmaticly) the browsers proxy to pass through your server this will make your life easier but will be more obvious to users.
How to create a simple proxy in C#?