I see several posts involving "Packets". I really don't have a guess on what they are, to me they are just numbers and letters. Information on what a packet(s) is, and does would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

In the abuse of the term here, packet means a bncs binary message.

[quote author=$t0rm link=board=17;threadid=8213;start=0#msg76025 date=1092777538]
In the abuse of the term here, packet means a bncs binary message.
[/quote]

By abuse of the term, I hope you mean that not all packets are BNCS. Anti, a packet is data sent through a socket to a server (in this case Battle.net) which is translated character by character to the byte equivilent to it's ASCII value. In VB terms that means 0xFF, &HFF or Chr(&HFF) would represent both the number 255 and in ASCII would by a character (the y with two dots over it). There are more in depth explanations of hex on this forum, search.

Bnet Docs are a good place for this subject aswell.

[quote author=PiaNKA link=board=17;threadid=8213;start=0#msg76039 date=1092778287]
[quote author=$t0rm link=board=17;threadid=8213;start=0#msg76025 date=1092777538]
In the abuse of the term here, packet means a bncs binary message.
[/quote]

By abuse of the term, I hope you mean that not all packets are BNCS. Anti, a packet is data sent through a socket to a server (in this case Battle.net) which is translated character by character to the byte equivilent to it's ASCII value. In VB terms that means 0xFF, &HFF or Chr(&HFF) would represent both the number 255 and in ASCII would by a character (the y with two dots over it). There are more in depth explanations of hex on this forum, search.
[/quote]

1.) By abuse of the term, I believe that $t0rm was trying to point out that a "packet" theoretically has absolutely nothing to do with the destination server, with regard to the platform it is operating (BNCS, Web, HTTP, Telnet, Gopher, FTP, etc.). A packet is actually a little segment of data (correct me if I'm wrong) defined within the data-link layer of the OSI networking model. Packets are supposed to be defined that low-level because protocol layers above it, such as Ethernet, TCP, and IP, all attach extra data to the packet. The abuse of the term that $t0rm was referring to is the calling of the data of a TCP/IP packet a "packet" itself, when in reality it's just part of a packet. That's why so many newbs get confused when they see "packets" in an Ethereal capture that have no data, and they're not sure what to look at.

2.) Why would you translate *every* character in a packet to a corresponding ASCII value when some parts of received data are not textual in nature?

Alright, thanks guys. I've been looking around at BnetDocs and that's helped me out beyond anything I could have expected!