Okay this a bit awkward because Piete doesn't appear to be in today, but there are a few things which need doing first (compiling which I mentioned in the previous message, and a 2nd opinion on the config file which I posted in the previous message to that), so perhaps this is not a problem. What we want to do (what I want to do!) with this latest challenge of Hal's is to try to see how fast it can be brute forced. To this end we need a kind of starting line effect, so everyone gets their software, and has it tested as running correctly. People using the socket doler have their clients ticking over, people using the WWW browser have their fingers poised over the button etc, and then Piete (when he gets back, let's say Monday 12:00 GMT to be safe, he can ammend that time later if necessary when he next gets on line) will start the race. Sound like a good plan? Where to find things... The brutessl software, the unix socket client, and the Windows NT client are on: http://www.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk/brute/ Also I have (temporarily, until Piete has a chance to update www.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk) the brutessl code here: http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/brutessl/ (both TAR file, and individual files untarred). If and when people compile binaries for architectures which don't typically come with compilers by default - such as DOS, OS/2, Macs, I'll put any binaries sent to me in this directory. When Piete gets back, he'll either make a pointer to this repository, or copy it on to www.brute. UNIX client. How to use the unix client... download brclient from the www page: http://www.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk/brute/ it is a perl program so you may have to edit the path to perl (the 1st line of the program should be #!/full/path/to/perl/binary), and you will have to mark it as executable. You will also need a shell script called brloop which uses brclient. It is on Piete's "sources" page, this page is indexed from the main brute page above, here it is explicitly. http://www.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/brute/README.html So get brloop. Get and compile the brutessl.tar.gz file. Run brloop. The brclient perl socket client talks to a machine with a DNS: sksp.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk on port number 19957 At the moment the server is not running so it will fail, but when Piete starts it up, your client will periodically ask for work, before the start time (Monday 12:00 GMT, or later time if this time is changed) your client will just be told to sleep for a while, when it wakes up it will ask for work again. In this way the client can be left ticking over, when work does arrive it will notice, as it will actually recieve some work when it makes the request, and start doing it, and reporting back when it finishes each chunk. For a more detailed description of the socket protocol that Piete's brclient will talk to the key server, have a look at this document "SKSP Simple Key Searching Protocol" an SMTP like protocol for requesting keys to search, and reporting back the results. http://www.brute.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/pub/brute/protocol.txt (This is indexed from the main www.brute page under "new protocol".) There is a windows NT socket client written by Andrew Brown, pointers to that also. If you want to write a socket client for another architecture (someone mentioned PowerPC?) the protocol is reasonably straight forward, and documented in the protocol.txt file above. Adam