Mythos

May 052011

Mythos Europe logo

I was amazed to see, that the game is actually already online. Was hearing rumors, that the team that left Blizzard North to start a new company named Flagship studios has declared bankrupt and abandoned the title. For some reason, while watching my own blog from my work PC for defects and glitches (don’t tell my boss 😉 ) I spotted an Advertising below the menu, claiming Mythos is already playable (closed beta is over).

I almost clicked my own Ad unit, which is actually forbidden by Google and may ban my Adsense account 😀

Anyway. First impressions.

The game is still very young. The servers are not very populated yet, but even so the developer team has implemented “rooms”, so If you are hunting in a full room, you may switch to an emptier one. For solo-lovers like me, this is very good. Even with young server population, we already see few capped heroes (5 days since start) so I suppose, this game will be more Blizzard-like than the other free-to-play MMORPGs around the globe. That means, the build should be all basic and straight forward to be made and EVERYTHING will be based around how good is your equipment. At least everyone in the Forum that reached level cap claims “It’s extremely boring” after this and all you have to do is hunt better equips and make money for your alt characters. (check the forum)

The 3D view may benefit from some fixes. The isometric 3D view is fine. The free view (MMO style) is badly implemented though. The same left mouse button is used to move/attack and for free-rotate too. Because of this, you often think you clicked on a monster, while actually you rotated your view. Also, you may rotate to such angle, that you actually look very … intimately … closely … near … at your hero’s a$$. In hack and slash games like this, few seconds of tinkering with your mouse to reposition your view can be critical. So I quickly abandoned the free 3D view and turned to isometric.

Intuitive controls. WASD + mouse. Every letter you used in Diablo II does the same here. The new stuff is World map, accomplishments Journal and Crafting. Enough said.

Three stream of classes. Thug, mage, mechanic. All of them has 3 main subclasses, which can be combined between (a.k.a. builds) in a way, that you may choose skills from all 3 subclasses or focus on a single one. Playable races. Elven, Cyclops, Human and Satyr. All four has their own pros and cons. Elves are cute, small, accurate. Cyclops are strong brutes with more armor and endurance. Humans are high HP jack-of-all-traders. And Satyrs have most MPs of all classes. To mix all this is to have (4 rases x 3 classes x 3 subclasses) 26 possible combinations of the pure builds. (e.g. every Cyclops Bloodletter will have 3 pure builds, every Gremlin Pyromancer too and so on).

On every level up (Level cap is 50) you receive 2 skill points, 5 stat points and 2 craft points. So far if there are no quest that give few point to this or that – those point are enough for … nothing. You make some points to Str and Vit so you can equip the stuff you will need and focus on pure Strength, Dexterity, Vitality or Spirit. There is another stat called Luck, which is not advanceable by leveling up. Equipment only.

The source of all evil.

Money. 100 copper = 1 silver, 100 silver = 1 gold, (and maybe 100 gold was 1 of whatever this in the left looked like, but they removed it already). The trade system is like WoW. You get your stuff into the market list and set start bid and final price. Basically, the good stuff can be started @ 10 to 20 times the NPC price. At least the good yellow (unique) ring goes in 10 minutes for 20 times the NPC price and level 15 hero can get 1-2 unique drops by quests only, so it’s not constant grinding for money. If you succeed in selling, you receive your money by mail 😀 while grinding in the deepest dungeon with 5% tax deducted. Much different from Fiesta online or Maple Story’s casual shop, where you have to stay online in the market until trading.

There is also no censoring 😀

There are some nasty bugs, like “you can’t shoot monsters laying in your feet”. You kill everything else with ease, but the monster that is in same XY coordinates as you – totally invulnerable to shooting. Grenades work though. Hope they fix this soon or add “kick” skill :D. The Free-MMO-like-3D view is a bad experience also. Some quests description is inaccurate, misleading or not translated good. E.g. “I’ve spent all my craft skills for BS and still can’t get a quest done, because it says Heraldry level above 2, then not explaining WHICH skill exactly you should rise to reach this level”. Hopefully and thankfully there is NPC that resets skill points (a.k.a. respec) and this will not be fatal. Sorry to say, the Stats can not be reset and if you choose to focus on STR, DEX or WIS – you stick with this for the chosen build.

Grinding barrier is reached normally after ~ 4-5 days of playing and starts at level 21. Quests are not enough to proceed leveling by them and you have to grind. The best place for grinding is … ahem … FAP, 😀 accessible from Crumbled Kingdom and there are often parties of 3-4 people collecting more for entering FAP instanced dungeon.

Server maintenance. Thursday. Really annoying. The same day as most of the other free MMORPGs around. I was hoping to play this game when Fiesta Online is down for maintenance. Hopefully Maple Story will keep their maintenance @ Wednesdays for the time being.

How to find the IP address of Skype user

Netw0rking 14 Responses »

May 042011

I’ve seen this question on several forums around the globe.

Most of the answers were “You can’t”

Strange.

You actually really CAN’T. From Skype :D. But Skype is solely based on P2P connections and you can’t connect to any peer if you don’t have/know his IP address. They simply refuse to disclose their protocol for the public, so we can write our own plugins for Skype.

So, I’ve just had a look at my netstat output (Linux console, sorry – for Windows read below):

bash-4.1# netstat -tupan | grep skype
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:20530           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2081/skype         
tcp        0      0 10.3.71.55:38804        212.75.19.204:6521      ESTABLISHED 2081/skype         
tcp        0      0 10.3.71.55:58519        93.152.140.108:23669    ESTABLISHED 2081/skype         
udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:59356         0.0.0.0:*                           2081/skype         
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:20530           0.0.0.0:*                           2081/skype         
bash-4.1#

And then I’ve talked to one of my colleagues in office via Skype and rechecked for any new connections:

bash-4.1# netstat -tupan | grep skype
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:20530           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2081/skype         
tcp        0      0 10.3.71.55:38804        212.75.19.204:6521      ESTABLISHED 2081/skype         
tcp        0      0 10.3.71.55:58519        93.152.140.108:23669    ESTABLISHED 2081/skype         
tcp        0    272 10.3.71.55:55886        10.3.71.97:16592        ESTABLISHED 2081/skype
udp        0      0 127.0.0.1:59356         0.0.0.0:*                           2081/skype         
udp        0      0 0.0.0.0:20530           0.0.0.0:*                           2081/skype         
bash-4.1#

See the 5-th line? There are too many lines, you may take the output in 2 files and then use diff.

bash-4.1# netstat -tupan | grep skype > file1.txt
bash-4.1# netstat -tupan | grep skype > file2.txt
bash-4.1# diff file1.txt file2.txt

Than I checked my own IP address:

bash-4.1# ifconfig | grep "addr:"
 inet addr:10.3.71.55  Bcast:10.3.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0

Obviously my colleague’s IP address is 10.3.71.97.

It’s as easy as this in Windows actually. You only need to enter the Command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and enter netstat the same way as with Linux (don’t know about the options after the dash and you will not have grep and protocol resolution). The Skype connection port is varying every time, so you may be in a bit of an analyze, but basically it’s the same. Your own IP address can be seen if you enter the command ipconfig /all:

If you are really LOST in CMD mode. Try this little nifty program from Windows SysInternals. It’s doing it’s job splendidly. Just don’t forget to use the sort and filter functions if you happen to have too much connections with your PC. The principle is the same.

That’s basically all. Remember your IP address (see above) Talk in Skype to the person for which IP address you are interested and watch the new connection Skype opens. Voila. The IP address is there.

All of this will not happen if the person in you are interested is using Proxy or any anonymizer software. Then you will see random Proxy address. And to try to hack a proxy server is not something that you will just find out by reading blogs and forums. Also, there is some chance that Microsoft will change part of the Skype protocol. Good luck. 😉

There are a lot of attempts to crack Skype protocol, all of them in vain. Perhaps some day the protocol will be reverse engineered and Skype security will not be so tight. There are rumors of ONE person who did this and got a nifty $um of money for his silence.

Anyway. Feel free to bridge your Skype connection over a sniffer and try your luck. I cannot teach you how to disassemble the Skype protocol.

CCMs and MEP types

Netw0rking 49 Responses »

May 032011

Continuity check message (CCM)

What is good to know? (if you are familiar with the basics, go ahead and read)

First of all. CCMs are the heartbeat of the network being monitored. By protocol description, every CCM has few important parameters: Origin (Maintenance domain and association), hello interval and status bits, sequence number and some Organization specific stuff which is irrelevant to this guide. The packet looks like this:

00000000  d4 c3 b2 a1 02 00 04 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |ÔÃ²¡............|
00000010  ff ff 00 00 01 00 00 00  96 35 c1 4c 0d 87 05 00  |ÿÿ.......5ÁL....|
00000020  74 00 00 00 74 00 00 00  01 80 c2 00 00 31 00 a0  |t...t.....Â..1. |
00000030  12 4b 2f 30 81 00 c0 03  89 02 20 01 04 46 00 01  |.K/0..À... ..F..|
00000040  3d 88 00 01 04 02 61 31  02 03 6d 61 31 00 00 00  |=.....a1..ma1...|
00000050  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000080  00 00 00 00 1f 00 0c 00  a0 12 02 2b 44 d3 3f 11  |........ ..+DÓ?.|
00000090  31 8a 00 04 00 01 01 02  00 01 02 00              |1...........|

If you are interested in the details, get the packet and dissect it in Wireshark.

Second. CCMs are transmitted between MEPs. By seeing each other’s CCMs the MEPs establish connectivity. There are however some important prerequisites.

MEPs in different domains do not connect to each other, no matter what.
MEPs in different associations do not connect to each other, no matter what.
MEPs with different hello intervals do not connect to each other, no matter what.

Another important thing. If you have association named MA1 for monitoring VPLS service and association MA2 monitoring VLAN with id 300, you can’t have CFM entities connected between them. No matter the VPLS could label and carry over packets with VLAN tag 300 in Its topology.

Another important thing is the Domain level:

---------- CCM level 7 --------------------->
---------- CCM level 5 ------> MEP level 5
---------- CCM level 1 ------X

MEPs filter all lower level CCMs, MEPs process all same level CCMs and MEPs pass untouched all higher level CCMs. This filtering logic is important. If you take a look in the diagram from the previous tutorial page, you will see, that Level 7 domain should not be stopped at any point if we are going to monitor it. And provider or operator domains should not flood CCM packets outside their respective End Points. This logic applies to all kinds of CFM monitored services and VLANs, and It also provides some security and less control traffic over the whole network.

Fourth. You should never forget the MEPs have direction and different behavior when they are facing UP or DOWN (respectively IN or OUT). The diagram below is created for easier understanding when I did OAM CFM presentation for my colleagues in Telco systems. It’s a bit crude, but not hard to grasp. Basically IN and UP MEPs are the same and the words “In” and “Up” have 2 letters. OUT and DOWN MEPs are the same and the words have more than 2 letters. IN/UP MEPs are sending CCM packets in direction towards the other device ports, that are members of the same domain (a.k.a. MIPs) while the DOWN/OUT MEPs are sending CCM packets in the opposite direction. If we visualize the device as a box with 5 holes it will look like this:

Easier to understand MEP direction

The difference in terminology is because of changes that took place while this relatively new monitoring protocol was developed in the last few years and the different vendors that support it. Currently, most (if not all) vendors use the Up and Down naming for MEPs, but if you happen to buy or receive older equipment or older software version – it’s good to know “which witch is which”.

Lot more can be said about CCMs and MEPs, but all in due time. If this article is too basic for you, please look at the OAM CFM connectivity chart.

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Continuity check message (CCM)

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