[ale] C code help

[Greg Freemyer]

Good Luck, that is quite a project.

2 things:

1) If this were Linux code, you could run strace on the code and see
all the kernel API calls,  that would pretty much give you the info
you are interested in.  Unfortunately, you don't seem to be talking
about Linux code here, so I have no ideas.

2) You said you decompiled 2 files.  Decompiled is going to have a
specific meaning to a programmer and to the best of my knowledge,
there are no tools for decompiling C code.  I have to a assume you
meant you reverse engineered a  couple of config files.

If you truly meant you decompiled a couple of executable or library
files, I'd be interested to know how to do that efficiently.  (I did
it once over 20 years ago by dis-assembilng a bunch of .o files into
assembly code, then guessing at the original C code, then compiling,
comparing, modifying C code, recombiling, recomparing.  It took a long
(and tedious) time to manually reverse compile just a couple of .o
files.)

Greg

On 5/22/05, Mark Wright <mpwright at speedfactory.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I don't really know where to start.  The background to my dilemma is
> important but has little to do with the problem.  Suffice it to say
> that I am not a coder or very experienced writing scripts but I have a
> disk image that boots a control device that I need to reverse engineer.
> 
> The ultimate end would be to replace the code with our own but for now
> just getting diag info from it and understanding it would a great step
> forward.
> 
> I have copied the disk to my Powerbooks hard drive and decompiled two
> files  that looked important.  Anybody on the list read c well enough
> to read these and tell me what I should do next?  As I said above I
> need to understand how it logs events and decode its error reporting.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> P.S    a little of the background.
> 
> The short story is I work for a very small company.  We have a guy who
> can probably do this but I know he will never have the time.  The
> future of my job may hinge on  knowing the secrets of this device.
> Like others have commented on their own jobs, I have tons of spare
> time.  I can't sit by and watch my reason for having a job slip away.
> I need to become a uber coder in a hurry or find enough help to get
> past this to the next issue down the road.
> 
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> 


-- 
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century