How to find out how to communicate with a network device

[Nathan4421]

I have a question for a network specialist. So I have a network device, it's a Sky Q receiver.

I found a nodejs plugin that sends Buffers to the device to communicate with it. To be clear I am able to send remote commands just like using the remote control. For example, he sends a Buffer containing:

var commandBytes = [4,1,0,0,0,0,Math.floor(224 + button / 16),button % 16]

where the button is a command for example 0 is power.

So my question is, this guy found out how to communicate with this receiver.

Is there a general way how to find out how you can communicate and send commands to a network device?

I tried sniffing everything I can with Wireshark when i start a socket connection to the device I receive a buffer.

Probably my question can't be answered that easy but I wanted to give it a try.

The main point, why im asking stack overflow-community about this is, I have do not a starting point how to ask google this question.

Thank you very much.

[Chrisee]

@Nathan4421 Sky Q has an undocumented network control ability which is exploited by some third party apos. Sky do not support this and there is a risk they will block it at any time. It is very useful for control of home cinema set ups so if they do a lot of wealthy people with these set ups will be grumpy..

For this to work any device must support network control at a guess Sky included this on the Q boxes for use in their test environment where they have racks of the things. It is a pretty open secret and the older Sky+HD boxes also have the same/similar system. The latest Glass kit does not appear to work in the same way or at least not heard of anyone finding one yet.

So whatever device you want to control must support the control first and most makers document these things Sky doesn't. 

[Nathan4421]

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@Chrisee wrote:

@Nathan4421 mythdhr Sky Q has an undocumented network control ability which is exploited by some third party apos. Sky do not support this and there is a risk they will block it at any time. It is very useful for control of home cinema set ups so if they do a lot of wealthy people with these set ups will be grumpy..

For this to work any device must support network control at a guess Sky included this on the Q boxes for use in their test environment where they have racks of the things. It is a pretty open secret and the older Sky+HD boxes also have the same/similar system. The latest Glass kit does not appear to work in the same way or at least not heard of anyone finding one yet.

So whatever device you want to control must support the control first and most makers document these things Sky doesn't. 

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Thanks for the information.