AOL

AOL
Status	Online! on January 28, 2013
Archiving status	Researching
Archiving type	Unknown
IRC channel	#aohell (on hackint)

This is about archiving the original AOL, not AOL's current website. The AOL system is currently in major disrepair. It is as if they left the machines sitting in the datacenter, and as they die, they do not fix any issues. There is much broken infrastructure.

Protocol

• http://web.archive.org/web/20020205182212/http://www.aol-files.com/fdo91/index.html
• http://web.archive.org/web/20020329213511/http://www.aol-files.com/downloads/docs/index.shtml
• http://www.angelfire.com/sk2/Twisted/Anti-AOL.htm
• http://web.archive.org/web/20011011181824/http://www.aol-files.com/misc/theaolprotocol.wri
  • Plaintext: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ricardo/misc/docs/theaolprotocol.txt
• http://sicexcels.tripod.com/rm-vpd.html

Reverse Engineering

The trunk version of Wireshark includes a dissassembler for the AOL protocol that breaks out the basic header information, such as the packet type and the token. It doesn't go into any detail about the contents of the packet, but this is a good start. This isn't available for download yet, so you'll have to build it yourself, from the svn trunk; once built wireshark reports itself as 1.9.0.

http://db48x.net/temp/Screenshot%20-%2001292013%20-%2008:28:31%20PM.png

URLs

aol://nnnn

• 1722: Keywords
• 2719: Chatrooms
• 3548: User profiles
• 4344: Interactive page
• 4400: File libraries
• 4401: Files
• 586x: ???

Examples

• aol://4344:1264.a2main.10029531.514525857
• aol://4400:8287
• aol://4344:1264.a2abt.10037404
• aol://4344:117.mtv.591130
• aol://4344:226.llll.2755674.520114429 (Access code: 3675)

Sources

• http://web.archive.org/web/20060207004722/http://daol.aol.com/aolatoz
• http://aolhostages.tripod.com/oldused-KWs.txt
• http://www.oocities.org/sunsetstrip/club/5468/secretz.txt
• http://koin.org/files/aol.aim/aol/fdo/tools/software%20library%20list%20bmb_libs.xls

Lots of sources: Documents covering how to make AOL forms and various such things:

• http://sicexcels.tripod.com/rm-vpd.html

Samples of custom forms:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010123213500/http://www.aol-files.com/fdo91/fdoorig/index.html

• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/downloads/tools/win/star/index.html - Open up the links under More Info

Some FDO lessons:

• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/fdo91/tutorial_lesson01.html
• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/fdo91/tutorial_lesson02.html
• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/fdo91/tutorial_lesson03.html
• http://web.archive.org/web/20010418134911/http://www.aol-files.com/fdo91/fdoman.html

About the class names:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010620011948/http://www.aol-files.com/articles/other_classes.html

Token list:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010622204341/http://www.aol-files.com/fdo91/tokens/list_tokens.html

Here is an early version of aol-files.com:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010201224500/http://www.aol-files.com/index.html

Atoms list:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20010407015458/http://www.aol-files.com/fdo91/atoms/index.html

Structure

           <balrog_> yes, but aol://4344:nnnn doesn't work without the extra
   [19:52] <balrog_> aol://4344:1264.a2main.10029531 also works
           <balrog_> simply aol://4344:1264.a2main does not work.

   [20:17] <DrainLbry> so to summarize we've got aol://4400:ID (from
                       spreadsheet), for file libraries, and
                       aol://4344:uniqueidentifier for interactive content
   [20:18] <balrog_> aol://4344:uniqueidentifier:ID
           <balrog_> as per
                     http://web.archive.org/web/20060207004722/http://daol.aol.com/aolatoz
                     keywords used to be aol://1722:keyword
           <balrog_> but that's no longer working

Software

• http://koin.org/files/aol.aim/aol/mAOL/
• http://web.archive.org/web/20010713011523/http://www.aol-files.com/downloads/tools/win/dbview/index.html
• http://web.archive.org/web/20010128152400/http://www.aol-files.com/downloads/tools/mac.html
• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/downloads/tools/win/star/
• http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files/index.html
• http://www.ppcmla.com/downloads/

Plans

wget-aol

Modify wget to support the AOL protocol. Ambitious, but it would let us create warc files, which will save us the trouble of figuring out how to organize everything on disk. Warc files make it much easier to create a server than can pretend to be the AOL server, or that can translate into http to allow anyone with a web browser to see what AOL was like.

script the client

Drive the real AOL client, perhaps with debugging tools installed, in order to capture both the FDO sources and screenshots of the rendering. Probably more fragile, but we wouldn't have to understand the actual protocol.