What's the best way to handle multiple outgoing connections in Perl? - perl

I have three TCP servers I need to connect to, each with different protocols, but all in nonblocking mode. Right now my plan is essentially opening a new IO::Socket per each one and adding them to IO::Select, then looping through can_read(). The idea is based on how servers are usually written in Perl, but it seems like it could work for clients.
I'm wondering if this is the best way to do it, furthermore I'm also wondering how I can probe each connection for disconnection, and initiate a reconnection to it without disrupting the other sockets. Any code examples would be a great help, or at least some points in the right direction on how best to do this.

You may want to use AnyEvent, or POE. Just look through the documentation, it has some nice examples to help you learn your way around.

Related

How to capture and forward SNMP messages using WinSNMP?

I'm fairly new to SNMP/WinSNMP and I'm trying to access what it would take to accept SNMP traffic on ports 161/162 and forward it to another device. I would like to be able to examine messages and possibly modify them before passing them to the device.
Would WinSNMP agent APIs be suitable for it? Are there any examples out there how to accomplish this in C++?
I'd appreciate any pointers.
Thanks.
Sounds like you want to make a Proxy Agent. There are already a great number of such implemented, so in order to avoid reinventing the wheel, do a web search for "windows snmp proxy" and see if you could use one of those products instead.

Documentation of TCP possible errors / unpredictable behaviours

I've started some time ago to work with custom-made servers, and even though I have experience to deal with the actual message exchange / serialization, etc, of client/server communications, I've had never coded an actual server from scratch.
In this sense, I have found raw TCP socket connections to be much trickier and unpredictable than I'd like.
For example, I coded a simple client/server application that would establish a long lived TCP connection, and the clients would receive push notifications from the server. Very simple, it worked very well in my test environment, even with many computers.
When I actually published this, though, I've had got lots of errors that later I would found that it was the lack of keepalive signals, which would make the connection to be cut, without giving me (either client or server) any feedback / error at all. The messages simply wouldn't be delivered, and fail silently.
I knew that TCP could break the connection, but I thought I could at least receive an error or such so I could reconnect in case of loss of connection.
This made me very insecure about rolling my own servers, as the possible errors and scenarios seem too many and unexpected, and I really don't want to learn about the unexpected behaviours when the actual application is deployed. With my current experience with server-side programming, the best way to deal with errors would be to enumerate all possible errors, and make sure I cover all exceptional cases when writing a program.
So, is there anywhere I could find a good documentation on the possible pitfalls / exceptions I could find with sockets, with how to detect them? It's been some time since I last worked with that, so I don't have any more fresh examples, but I remember that e.g. when you receive an empty message it would mean that the connection broke.
I'd also love to hear suggestions, or maybe simple libs (preferrably in C) that cover them so I can base my work in it? My main platform is linux, but a cross-platform solution is much appreciated!
Thank you!

Creating RAW Sockets tutorial/explanation?

So Im trying to further my understanding of sockets, but I want to start out at the lowest level first (well in C, not assembly lol)
However most sites that I deal with use the SOCK_STREAM or SOCK_DGRAM. However I have read around on Beejs guide....but I don't know if that actually deals with RAW sockets or not.
I'll obviously need to call SOCK_RAW in my call to sockets, but theirs not really a WHOLE lot of information about it. And this is just for learning purposes, i always try to understand the root of whats going on in abstraction.
Thanks
Assuming you're using Linux, I would look at the man pages for socket and packet as a start. From here and after reading a few other man pages to figure out how to actually send packets on the wire, I'd install Wireshark and experiment with sending hand-crafted packets and using Wireshark to capture and analyze them. You can learn a lot about the different network layers this way and how you can tweak different values in various headers.

PostgreSQL socket connection

Is it possible to send data on a socket over a TCP?IP connection from a PostgreSQL stored procedure or trigger?
If you know of any useful examples pleas tell me.
If you know of something similar for other data base systems it would also be helpful.
Thanks in advance.
Answer from Milen solves the technical side of the question. But there is also a problem of interactions.
Let's assume you have trigger that does things over TCPIP. This means that the query that launched the trigger can take a long time (think network issues, service issues, firewalls).
Usually much better solution is to store information in some kind of queue, and addition of service, which checks the queue (perhaps using NOTIFY/LISTEN feature of PostgreSQL), and does what's necessary over TCP/IP - with proper handling of long connections, retries and so on.
If you'd be inclined to use such mechanism, you might want to check PgQ from SkyTools.
Yes, it's possible but you have to use one of the "untrusted" languages - PL/perlU, PL/pythonU, etc.
And then all examples you need you'll find in the documentation of the respective language.

Deciphering MMORPG Protocol Encoding

I plan on writing an automated bot for a game.
The tricky part is figuring out how they encoded their protocol... To make the bot run around is easy, simply make the character run and record what it does in wireshark. However, interpreting the environment is more difficult... It recieves about 5 packets each second if you are idle, hence lots of garbarge.
My plan: Because the game runs under TCP, I will use freecap (http://www.freecap.ru/eng) to force the game to connect to a proxy running on my machine. I will need this proxy to be capable of packet injection, or perhaps a server that is capable of resending captured packets. This way I can recreate and tinker around with what the server sends, and understand their protocol encoding.
Does anyone know where I can get a proxy that allows packet injection or where I can perform packet injection (not via hardware, as is the case with wireless or anything!)
Where of if I can find a server/proxy that resends captured packets (ie: replays a connection).
Any better tools or methodologies for pattern matching? Something which can highlight patterns from mutliple messages would be GREAT.
OR, is there a better way to decipher this here? Possibly a dissasembly strategy (via hooking a winsock function and starting the dissassembly from there) ? I have not done this before so I am not sure. OR , any other ideas?
Network traffic interception and protocol analysis is generally a less favored method to accomplish your goal here. For most modern games, encryption is a serious factor, and there are serious headaches associated with the protocol analysis for any but trivial factors of the most common gameplay scenarios.
Most modern implementations* of what you are trying to do rely on reading and manipulating the memory space and process of a running client. The client will have already done all the hard parts for you, including decrypting the traffic and sorting it into far more easy to read data structures. For interacting with the server you can call functions built into the client instead of crafting entire series of packets from scratch. The plus to this approach is that you have to do far less work to interpret the data and produce activity. The minus is that there is often some data in the network traffic that would be useful to a bot but is discarded by the client, or that you may want to send traffic to the server that the client cannot produce (which, in my own well-developed hierarchy for such, is a few steps farther down the "cheating" slope).
*...I say this having seen the evolution of the majority of MMORPG botting/hacking communities from network protocol analyzers like ShowEQ and Odin's Eye / Excalibur to memory-based applications like MacroQuest and InnerSpace. On that note, InnerSpace provides an excellent extensible framework for the memory/process-based variant of what you are attempting, and you should look into it as a basis for your project if you abandon the network analysis approach.
As I've done a few game bots in the past (for fun, not profit or griefing of course - writing game bots is a lot of fun), I recommend the following:
If you can code and there isn't cheat protection preventing you from doing it, I highly recommend writing an injected DLL for the following reasons:
Your DLL will be able to access the game's memory space directly, and once you reverse-engineer the data structures (either by poking around memory or by code disassembly), you'll have access to lots of data. This will also allow you to bypass any network encryption the game may have. The downside of accessing process memory directly is that offsets and data structures change between versions - however, data structures don't change very often with a stable game, and you can compensate offset changes by searching for code patterns instead of using fixed offsets.
Either way, you'll still be able to hook WinSock functions using API hooks (check out Microsoft Detours and the excellent but now-commercial madCodeHook).
otherwise, I can only advise that you give live/interactive packet editors like WPE Pro a try.
In most scenarios, the coolest methods (code reverse-engineering and direct memory access) tend to be the least productive. They require a lot of skill (to understand the code) and time, both initially (to go through all the code and develop code to interact with the data structure) and for maintainance (in case the game is being updated). (Of course, they sometimes do allow doing cool stuff which is impossible to do with the official client, but most of the time this is obvious as blatant cheating, and likely to attract the GMs quickly). Most of the time bots are made by replacing game graphics/textures with solid colours, and creating simple "pixel" bots which search for certain colours on the screen and react accordingly (e.g. click them).
Hope this helps, and remember - cheating is only fun when it doesn't make the game less fun for everyone else ;)
There are probably a few reasonable assumptions you can make that should simplify your task enormously. However, to make the best use of them you will probably need greater comfort with sleeves-rolled-up programming than it sounds like you have.
First, it's a safe bet that the encryption they are using falls into one of three categories:
None
Cheesy
Far better than you are likely to crack
With the odds of the middle case being very low.
Next, it's a safe bet that the packets are encrypted / decrypted close to the edge of the program (right as they come in, right before they go out) and that the body of the game deals with them in decrypted form.
Finally, the protocol they are using most likely consists of either
ascii with data blocks
binary goo
So do a little packet sniffing with a card set in promiscuous mode for unencrypted ascii. If you see some, great, you're ahead of the game. But if you don't give up the whole tapping-the-line idea and instead start following the code as it returns from the sending data out by breakpointing and stepping with a debugger. Figure the outermost layer or three will be standard network stuff, then will come the encryption layer, and beyond that the huge mass of stuff that deals with the protocol unencrypted.
You should be able to get this far in an hour if you're hot, a weekend if you're reasonably skilled, motivated, and diligent, and never if you are hopeless. But it is possible in principle (and doubtlessly far easier in practice) to do it this way.
Once you get to where something that looks like unencrypted goo comes in, gets mungled, and the mungled form goes out, then start worrying about what it means.
-- MarkusQ
A) I play a MMO and do not support bots, voting down...
B) Download Backtrack v.3, run an arpspoof on your default gateway and your host. There is an application that will spoof the remote host's SSL cert sslmitm (I believe is the name) which will then allow you to create a full connection through your host. Then fireup tcpdump/ethereal/wireshark (choose your pcap poison) and move around do random stuff to find out what packet is doing what. That will be your biggest challenge; but proxying with a Man in the Middle attack on yourself is the way to go.
C) I do not condone this activity, this information is only being provided as free information.
Sounds like there is not encryption going on, so you could do a network approach.
A great place to start would be to find the packet ID's - most of the time, something near the front of the packet is going to be an ID of the type of the packet. For example move could be 1, shoot fired could be "2", chat could be "4".
You can write your own proxy that listens on one port for your game to connect, and then connects to the server. You can make keypresses to your proxy fire off commands, or you can make your proxy write out debugging info to help you go further.
(I've written a bot for an online in game in PHP - of all things.)