Luigi Auriemma

I've been looking into options for programmatically controlling a ventrilo server, for administration purposes. I would like to be able to add/remove users, set access rights, etc, programmatically.

The only option I've found so far that comes close is the ventrilo rcon tool you have. Looking at the code for the rcon tool, I'm not sure I can understand all of its capabilities. I see you're putting together the messages to send to the server, but I am having a hard time understanding what all the possible messages are and what their capabilities are. It seems that only a few commands are implemented. You do have a create user command, which is along the lines of what I'm looking for. But it looks like other commands for managing users are not available. I wonder if there is some documentation I might have missed, or another approach that is more documented.

I implemented only the "create user" command for compatibility and usability reasons.
practically on the 2.x series users can be deleted on the fly specifying only their name while on 3.x it's needed to use their ID number which so obligates the reading of all the users info and the building of a memory database which is a boring thing.
then for the other editing commands (used only in 3.x which has a complex system of users rights) they can't be easily implemented because there are too much settings (at least 32) which in a command-line tool are not easy to choose like using a gui program (for example when you use the client and you must simply select or deselect the settings on the fly) and so I have preferred to leave only the "create user" command for the moment.

Thats interesting. So the other commands, how would you know the message format for them? Is that something you'd figure out by reverse engineering, or is there a simpler method?

it's enough simple, use ventrilo_proxy (http://aluigi.org/papers.htm#ventrilo_proxy) and connect your ventrilo client to it so that you can see the content of all the packets included the 0x4a one (starts with 4a 00 00 00 and is bigger than 80 bytes so you see it enough easily) which contains the settings of the specified user ID.

so then you must simply edit the settings of a user and checking the bytes which chages, easy :)

note: if sometimes you see garbage/random data dumped by ventrilo_proxy it's enough that you relaunch it, rarely happens

Well the proxy does work smoothly. The messages are all in their binary format which I presume is not really documented anywhere.

something it's in the code of ventrcon.c (douser, exactly from line 806), for example at offset 0x14 you should see the 32 bit number referred to the user's ID while at offset 0x3c should start the sequence of '1's which are referred to the various settings