Hello, FYI.
This email contains a short description of a proposed technique to do xmodem file transfers without a physical RS232 serial connection, when only a network connection is available. This may be useful for obtaining firmware from embedded devices in order to test for GPL or other FOSS license violations. Some months ago I temporarily possessed a sonicwall firewall appliance and after sshing in found clues that it may possibly be running Linux, although it did not come with a GPL notice or offer for source. (IIRC output indicated that the firmware was compiled on an Linux system. I don't recall any more at this time.) The device dumped and loaded firmware using xmodem, but there was no available documentation as to what pins were what on the serial port. The command to load/dump firmware was available from network access via ssh. I fretted over how to obtain the firmware to further investigate the licensing question and came up with the following technique. I was unable to test this method having lost access to the sonicwall hardware but wanted to publicly document my thoughts in the hope that someone will someday find this helpful. If anyone ever does an analysis of the sonicwall firmware I would be interested in hearing the result. Regards, Karl <k...@meme.com> Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward." -- Robert A. Heinlein -------------<snip>------------- How to dump the firmware from a sonicwall. In window 1 (make pty for minicom): socat PTY,link=$HOME/foo,raw,nonblock,echo=0 EXEC:bash,raw,pty,nonblock,echo=0 In window 2 (start mincom, connect to sonicwall): minicom -p $(readlink $HOME/foo) port0 ssh -l admin 192.168.168.168 In window 1 (enter password): password In window 2 (dump firmware): firmware download current In window 1 (start xmodem receive): Ctrl-A,Z,... _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss