Hello all, I’m working on a school project where we’re supposed to document the port numbers and protocols used by open source software to communicate with external services. I decided to use KiCad for this purpose.
I believe that the software has two types of networked operations - checking for updates and sending crash/error report data through Sentry.
I believe KiCad uses the standard HTTPS port (443) over TCP to check for updates on downloads.kicad.org. can anybody confirm this?
I was unable to find what port or protocol would be use to forward crash and error reports to Sentry. Can anybody provide some guidance on this?
I am guessing that the intention of your school project is to learn to work with a network sniffer or other software to find out what programs do. “Managed switches” can be set to reroute / copy network traffic, and software such as wireshark can be used to analyze the captured traffic.
It’s more about looking at documentation but I couldn’t find anything in the official one. I’m not able to install that software on my school laptop.
Or there is always the dreaded source code approach… 
Documentation on the site is for end users. When designing a circuit board no one cares about what ports crash reports use. If you can’t install software on the school laptop then perhaps they are not giving you the proper tools to start with.
Also, I’m not aware that Kicad checks for updates. On Linux systems that is up to the package manager. I have NO clue as to what Windows does.
Note that normally a software app like KiCad is a network client. Therefore the server port is determined by the service. The client side will use a random free port for the TCP connection. (There are 4 parameters in a TCP network connection: server IP, server port, client IP, client port.) If accessing a web site by https then yes, it’ll be port 443 on the server side. I don’t know what port the Sentry server uses, but it could be https also.