Recreating display output from X11 Stream - x11

I do have two computers which are used to control an industrial plant. One of them controls the plant, the other is used as a failsafe. They are directly connected over ethernet, and the inactive" one just mirrors the display of the main controller.
I did capture the network traffic between the two and when i open it up in wireshark i see its all X11 traffic. It does include the initial connection request and also includes all the "draw calls" in plain text.
I now want to "replay" this captured stream and recreate the screen content from it. Is there any program available which can do so? Ideally directly from the wireshark capture file
My thoughts so far:
I can easily replay the network data itself and send it to some socket, but the communication is specific to the session, e.g. some commands refer to specific handle values set up earlier. Its unlikely a new session would work with the same values so i cant just pipe it into some program

What you see from your connection is only your connection requests + events relevant to the windows created by you ( or other's client windows where your connection sets an event mask ), and because of that quite a lot is lost. I'm not aware of the programs that can reconstruct best possible version of the screen from one client traffic but it's certainly not possible to have 100% accurate copy of the screen and best possible model will be far away from real screen (unless your connection periodically polls for backing store content of each mapped window).

Related

Is it possible to capture the rendering audio session from another process?

I am taking my first dives in to the WASAPI system of windows and I do not know if what I want is even possible with the windows API.
I am attempting to write program that will record the sound from various programs and break each in to a separate recorded track/audio file. From the reseacrch I have done I know the unit I need to record is the various audio sessions being rendered to a endpoint, and the normal way of recording is by taking the render endpoint and performing a loopback. However from what I have read so far in the MSDN the only interaction with sessions I can do is through IAudioSessionControl and that does not provide me with a way to get a copy of the stream for the session.
Am I missing something that would allow me to do this with the WASAPI (or some other windows API) and get the individual sessions (or individual streams) before they are mixed together to form the endpoint or is this a imposable goal?
The mixing takes place inside the API (WASAPI) and you don't have access to buffers of other audio clients, esp. that they don't exist in the context of the current process in first place. Perhaps one's best (not so good, but there are no better alternatives) way would be to hook the API calls and intercept data on its way to WASAPI, if the task in question permits dirty tricks like this.

Drop selected packets at the link layer

I need to dump some incoming packets and then prevent them from going up the stack, so that applications won't process them.
Now, tcpdump works at layer 2, right? So ideally I should find some tool that I'd use right after tcpdump that drops selected packets. The filter I apply in tcpdump and when I drop packets is going to be the same.
Anything that already does this?
Now, tcpdump works at layer 2, right? So ideally I should find some tool that I'd use right after tcpdump that drops selected packets.
Tcpdump captures from a network at the link layer, yes. However, "captures", in this case, means "passively taps into the network, getting copies of all packets received and sent". It does not tap into the network in a fashion that allows it to prevent those packets from being processed by the network stack. Think of it as being similar to tapping a phone line - whoever's tapping the line can listen to the conversation, but they can't prevent somebody on one side of the conversation from hearing what the person on the other side says.
Anything that already does this?
There might be, but the mechanism that it would use to do so is probably going to be very dependent on the operating system it's running on. What operating system is the machine on which you need to trap the packets running.

How does Google Docs autosave work?

Okay, I know it sounds generic. But I mean on an AJAX level. I've tried using Firebug to track the NET connections and posts and it's a mystery. Does anyone know how they do the instant autosave constantly without DESTROYING the network / browser?
My guess (and this is only a guess) is that google uses a PUSH service. This seems like the most viable option given their chat client (which is also integrated within the window) also uses this to delivery "real time" messages with minimal latency.
I'm betting they have a whole setup that manages everything connection related and send flags to trigger specific elements. You won't see connection trigers because the initial page visit establishes the connection then just hangs on the entire duration you have the page open. e.g.
You visit the page
The browser established a connection to [example]api.docs.google.com[/example] and remains open
The client-side code then sends various commands and receives an assortment of responses.
These commands are sent back and forth until you either:
Lose the connection (timeout, etc.) in which case it's re-established
The browser window is closed
Example of, how I see, a typical communication:
SERVER: CLIENT:
------- -------
DOC_FETCH mydocument.doc
DOC_CONTENT mydocument.doc 15616 ...
DOC_AUTOSAVE mydocument.doc 24335 ...
IM collaboratorName Hi Joe!
IM_OK collaboratorName OK
AUTOSAVE_OK mydocument.doc OK
Where the DOC_FETCH command is saying I want the data. The server replies with the corresponding DOC_CONTENT <docname> <length> <contents>. Then the client triggers DOC_AUTOSAVE <docname> <length> <content>. Given the number of potential simultaneous requests, I would bet they keep the "context" in the requests/responses so after something is sent it can be matched up. In this example, it knows the IM_OK matches the second request (IM), and the AUTOSAVE_OK matches the first request (AUTOSAVE)--Something like how AOL's IM protocol works.
Again, this is only a guess.
--
To prove this, use something like ethereal and see if you can see the information transferring in the background.

How do I monitor a port for traffic in Windows?

I am trying to find a solution to monitor the traffic (in and out) through a specific port. It is not required to capture the packets, or do anyting else. What it does is to be a traffic listener to make sure there are messages sent to or received from this port every 10 minutes. It has to be running at the background all the time (like a daemon), and without significant performance impact. Based on my research, one choice is to use an existing tool to do that. There are a bunch of tools out there to monitor or sniff the traffic, such as wireshark. Well, seems most of them monitor the traffic passing through a interface, instead of a port, or they can't run as a daemon. Another choice to write a program to do this. SharpPcap seems to be a good choice, but I still need to capture and analyze the packets to know whether such traffic exist. Could somebody suggest what I should do?
SharpPcap handles packet capturing in the same manner as Wireshark, so you can set filters to limit the packet being captured to a specific port the same way in SharpPcap as you can in wireshark. Except, SharpPcap will be a much lighter weight option vs wireshark.
Download the SharpPcap source tree and look at the Example05.SetFilter.
To narrow down the results so you capture only the packets you want to see you'll need to employ a few filters.
Pcap uses a common language across all applications that use it do specify the filters to set. Capture programs that use winpcap (windows) or libpcap (*nix) include, sharppcap, wireshark, pcap.net, winpcap, libpcap, tcpdump, etc... For a great resource on how to use pcap filters see this link.
Here are the filters you need:
ether host ehost
port port
Where the ehost is the MAC address of the computer sending/receiving the packets and the port is the port you want to monitor. So the full filter string would be.
SetFilter("ether host ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff and port 60");
The MAC and port here are for illustration purposes only, you'd obviously change them with the values that pertain to your specific setup.
This, used in the SetFilter example will simply print out a line of info with the time of when the packet was captured to the command line every time a packet is captured and meets the criteria if your filter.
If you want more detailed info about the packet, such as info from the headers or the packet's payload, you'll need to parse the incoming raw packet. Be sure to ask for help on the sourceforge project's forum if you need some tips on how to do this. The project developers are very active and always willing to help.
The best way that will limit the impact your tool will have on performance is via an ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) Real-time Consumer (i.e. a tool that activates an ETW trace and reads it immediately instead of saving it to a file). This MSDN sample is a great way to see how to do this via C# and it gives you some code to get started.

Send Apple Event from Windows?

My son has a MacOS 9 box to which he is sending remote AppleEvents from his Leopard-based MacBook. Is there any way, programmatically, that I can send remote AppleEvents via TCP/IP from my Windows 7 Toshiba?
If it helps, apple events are sent on port 3031 via TCP/UDP.
From the high level, there are four pieces to apple events:
The data aggregation API (data requests are put into an opaque in memory structure). This API as it stands was wordy and painful to use. Thank goodness you have access to languages that have better data aggregation tools
Conversion/serialization - the opaque data structure is turned into something that can be serialized and transported to another process and for same machine events, this may be a null serialization
Transport the data is transported from one process to another. Single machine is probably just enqueuing a copy of the data. Remote machine is transport over a network protocol, which could be TCP/IP (but it works with AppleTalk as well) and may require authentication.
Deserialization/Conversion
You will most likely need to do steps 2, 3, and 4. If you don't care about getting any information back, you can skip 4, since one of the flags in a sent event is "no reply".
There are a relatively small number of types in the AE data model. I would write code on your OS X machine to send each and every type and reverse engineer the packets when they're sent. To speed up the process you might want to use appscript, on the OS X machine which will let you send events from Ruby, Objective C, or Python.
Sniff the packets between the MacBook and the MacOS 9 box using something like tcpdump or Wireshark. This will tell you what an AppleEvent looks like on the wire.
Then replicate those packets using your programming environment of choice on Windows.
I suggest wrapping up the code that you write into a library that you can reuse in other applications.
Good luck - this might be quite tricky!!
if you're talking about growl notification, there are libraries to use that. for example, here is the growl library for ruby

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