Tag Archives: netsed

Taking over Netsed

Netsed, the network packet stream editor, is a program originally written by Michal Zalewski .

While the program idea is good, it’s implementation had some lack, and nobody seamed to care enough to fix it.

I did already hack it some years ago, and it appeared that my changes was fixing a debian RC bug (#586037) so I took netsed maintenance as one of my new projects!

For now only my changes and patches proposed by Mats Erik Andersson are integrated.

But I will start working on a test suite (still have to find the right tools for that, would ruby be nice ?), and of course implement UDP support.

Also I’d like to really thank Mats Erik Andersson and Tim Retout for their answers and support.

Resources:

netsed

An old hack (2 years old  according to my subversion db !!)

This started with my 5.1 Yamaha audio amplifier, this device has network access to listen to netradios directly ! I wanted to hack it to play a personal netradio.

I configured my dhcp to have it report my server as gateway and used wireshark to listen how it was connecting the Internet. It appeared that the menu on the device was provided by XML streams.

I first did some DNS spoofing and placed on my apache server a fake XML file, the Yamaha amplifier couldn’t tell the difference and I could play some local mp3 files.

The next step was to have both the normal radios and some personal radios. That’s here netsed becomes useful. The idea was to filter the main menu XML to add an extra item that liks to a local XML page linking to personal radio.

I never get to the step where I setup an Icecast server however I got the extra menu working.

netsed did basically the job, but for some reason it was not closing connections to the http server so it generated several timeout errors, that’s basically what I fixed in the netsed code.

my Trac page about netsed