A little Question and Answer Thread.

[Noah Buttes]

How To: Call the shuttle in TermOS (a hacking-free guide).

When you call the shuttle with COMMaster, what the program is actually doing is sending a packet to the communications dish, telling it to make the actual call. The packet looks something like this:

address_1 = {net address of the comms dish}
command = call
shuttle_id = emergency
acc_code = {authentication code goes here}

Step 1: Get the comms dish address. To do this, use "disconnect" to log off of the dwaine server, then term_ping to get a list of addresses. One of these will be the comms array. Write down that address. Another will say mainframe (not mainframe_ai, that's different). Connect back to mainframe with "connect {net address of mainframe}" and log back into Dwaine.

Step 4: Mount the comms dish. This requires SU access. to gain SU access, use "su" followed by "term_login" with a superuser ID. There are ways to spoof this. Once logged in as SU, do "mount {net address of the comms dish} commsdish". The third string can be anything you want, but I'm using commsdish because that's what it is. This will create a /mnt/commsdish directory that you can echo things to in order to send them to that device.

Step 3: Get the authentication code. There's a number of ways you could do this using a packet sniffer or the station packet radio, but the one that I'm going to talk about here is the authentication disk. Simply pick up the disk, put it in a computer with a floppy drive (you can build one for TermOS, but all of  the pre-built computers with floppies are ThinkDOS) and read it.

Step 4: Echo your signal to the mounted comms dish. To do so, use "echo command=call|nshuttle_id=emergency|nacc_code={authentication code goes here} ^ /mnt/commsdish". In this command, |n is the newline code and ^ marks the end of the file to be echoed and the start of the address to echo it to. Assuming you did everything right, this should call the emergency shuttle.

For extra fun, try mounting a printer. They're listed as print devices in term_ping and anything echoed to them automatically prints. They have no authentication requirements, either. |n still lets you do newlines, though!

E: This forum does not like greater than or less than signs.

You said step 4 twice.