Hey Ben!   
      
    BR> Worked perfectly ;-)   
      
   Wow!  Has hell frozen over?  I never dreamt I'd live to see the day.   
   It would be interesting to hear what else is working there.  Do you   
   have coreutils?  How about sed?   
      
    BR> For now all I need is the utilities like pktinfo ;-)   
      
   Either that or you could write the entire autoposting dealie with   
   bash/perl.  Up to you.  I am game either way.   
      
   Just for fun try this on the bash prompt;   
      
     echo "2 68 38 393 261 0 0" | \   
       perl -e 'while(<>){@myarray = split(/ +/, $_);};\   
                print pack("S*", @myarray);' > partial.msg   
      
   The above should produce a 14 byte file called partial.msg with 7 16   
   bit binary integers.  Those should be the first part of the MSG header   
   if Janis' node is where you send the autopost to.  If that works then   
   try this to test if straight bash can be used to handle the rest;   
      
     echo -ne "AREA:TUXPOWER\x0d" >> partial.msg   
     echo -ne "\x01Stinkin'_kludges\0xd" >> partial.msg   
      
   If all the above works then it should be extremely doable to write   
   a script to handle this particular issue.  Let me know if you're   
   interested and we can pick it up from here.  Also if you have   
   coreutils then we can exploit it's 'date' command to take care of   
   the MSG DateTime variable.   
      
   Life is good,   
   Maurice   
      
   --- GNU bash, version 4.2.10(2)-release (x86_64-atom-linux-gnu)   
    * Origin: Pointy Stick Society (1:261/38.9)