Shoutbox

Hey guys, I'm needing a little bit of help with a minor script. Well, maybe a lot of help, because I honestly dont have a clue, but maybe I can find out if this is at least possible.

I have an xbox, which runs xbmc on my network, and I'm looking to detect a few of the functions froom this. The xbox runs a broadcast function in the background, which sends a UDP datagram whenever an error occurs (among other things).
Basically, I'm looking for a way to listen for this broadcast, and take the information from it, to store in a variable.

I've looked on the xbmc website, and found this information about the function.

The Broadcast facility uses the UDP broadcast protocol with a default port setting of 8278.
XBMC broadcasts on the IP address 255.255.255.255 which is the limited broadcast address.
The actual broadcasts are delimited by <b></b> and may consist of a numerical or textual description of the event (depening on the event)

I've used a small util which lets me see these on Windows, and one of the messages appears as "<b>OnPlayBackStarted;1</b>"
I know how to remove the <b>s etc, but I dont have a clue about the actual listening, or reading information.
Can anyone give me a clue as to whether this is possible, and how it would be done?
Thanks
Stefan Leroux

Ill make a .net COM object to listen for the broadcasts later

You're better off making this stuff outside WLM and Plus... you can easily download a network monitor application and watch all the ports and packets..

But if you want to do this and use the information in a script, search for Xniff and read those threads and download some scripts people made (examples).

Have fun!

Thats great cheers.  I'll give Xniff a try, I'm just slightly dubious because I'm on a wireless network, but I'll try, maybe cable it too for testing.

Thanks guys

It works with wireless too!
Have fun!

OK, I've downloaded and registered Xniff.ocx, but I can't get it to detect the packet I'm listening for.  I've used a couple of other programs so I know I'm receiving the infomation to my computer, but theres nothing showing in the debug wheres its meant to show.

I just copied the script from Pai's suggestion, to listen for msn events, and changed the srcport to my desired one, so I'm pretty positive that I have it right, unless I need to do something else because of it being a UDP port.

Anyone have any suggestions for me?
Thanks all

Post your code and we'll see...
Other than that maybe the app isn't actually using the port you think it is... so in that case I'd recommend you either catch all the incoming packets (remove the port == x if clause in your script) or you download a network analyzer to catch all the packets and then you can figure out in which port your stuff is coming in.
Have fun!

OK, I was going to post the code, but I tried listening for all traffic first, and adding srcport into the debug, so now I have it being detected, but it's on port 1028. 
Thing is though, I have the same script running on mIRC, and it definitlely detects on 8278.  I have also run "attacker" (port listener) which says "port 1028 to port 8278".

I'm happy enough with it working, but can anyone explain why its different, or more importantly, if its listening to port 1028, will that stop anything using port 1028 from detecting, or does Xniff allow ports to be reused.
Thanks for all the help anyways Deco.

Well you have both srcport and destport.. which means there's a port from which the packet is sent (from the other end such as the server) and the port in which the packet comes to your computer. So maybe the port you receive the packets is 1028 and the port in which the packet is sent from the server is 8278.

Just guessing what could be happening but it seems to me you have what you wanted.

If you still want something else to happen in your script just keep sending your doubts and we'll see about them.

Have fun!

Nope.  Just finished playing about with my script, and I think thats everything I need the port-sniffing for, so thank you very very much for all the help.