Guide to figuring out Ragnarok Online server details (version 3)

Change history

Version 2: Fixed some typos.
Version 3: Added a hexadecimal-to-decimal calculator.

May 23, 2006:

This guide is outdated. There's a new, more accurate guide available at:
http://www.openkore.com/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_figuring_out_server_information

Introduction

Kore needs the following information about the Ragnarok Online server before it can login:

IP address
Port number
Server master version number
Server version number (not the same as the master version number)

Sometimes you don't know this information, or the information changes. This guide teaches you how to figure out that information.

Note: This guide does not cover servers that use secure logins, such as idRO.

Required software

A packet sniffer: either WPE Pro (for Windows 2000/XP) or WPE 1.3 (for Win95/98/ME). You can also use any other packet sniffer you prefer, if you know what you're doing.
Note: some virus scanners think that WPE is a trojan. That is not true, WPE is not a virus or trojan. Ignore such warnings.
A Ragnarok Online client.

(A packet sniffer is a program that finds out what data another program tries to send to the Internet.)

Step 1: Select target program

Start your Ragnarok Online client. Do not do anything yet.

Start WPE/WPE Pro. First you must tell it what program's data you want to sniff. Click on the little arrow besides the "Target program" button, and select the program name of your Ragnarok Online client. This is usually ragexe.exe, or sakexe.exe (if you're playing with the Sakray client). If you play on a private server, the program name may be different.

Step 2: Start sniffing

Click on the "Play" button to start sniffing packets.

Step 3: Login with your Ragnarok Online client

Go back to the Ragnarok Online client. Type in some random gibberish in your login dialog, and press Enter. It doesn't matter what you put in the ID and Password fields, as long as they're both more than 3 characters.

You only have to press Enter, nothing more. It doesn't matter whether the login succeeded or failed.

Step 4: Stop sniffing

Go back to WPE. Click on the "Stop" button. A subwindow will appear in WPE. You can now close the Ragnarok Online window.

Step 5: Analyze

The Ragnarok Online client sent some data to the Ragnarok Online server. This data contains all the information we need. (In this example, I used the iRO client to login. All example information here applies only to iRO Chaos/Loki.)

The text under the Destination column is the IP address and the port number of the Ragnarok Online server.
In this case, the IP is 38.144.194.2, and the port number is 6900.
The column in the middle (starting from "64 00") shows the bytes that the Ragnarok Online client tried to send to the server. The third byte is the server version number. However, it's in hexadecimal. You need to convert it to a decimal number, by using a calculator that supports hexadecimal.
In this case, the server version number is 18 (hexadecimal 12 is decimal 18).
The last byte is the master version number. This number is also in hexadecimal. In this case, our master version number is 1.

So the information that we have gather in this example is as follows:

IP: 38.144.194.2
Port: 6900
Master version number: 1
Version number: 18

In Kore's configuration file, we put this:

master_name_0 (Put your server name here)
master_host_0 38.144.194.2
master_port_0 6900
master_version_0 1

version 18