ofx direct connect

[Jon Hamkins]

David Reiser wrote:

> Bad news with respect to MSMoney ofx logs. Once set up (and it takes  
> a registry modifier every time you  open MSMoney >2006, and it takes  
> the 5/16/2006 version of the modifier for the Money 2007 trial  
> version...) you only get the ofx data stream, not any address info. I  
> guess for MSMoney, one needs to run something like ethereal and mess  
> with those logs. Not for the faint of heart.

More bad news about MS Money 2006 and OFX logs.  I installed ethereal 
and sniffed all the traffic.  At some point Money directs my computer to 
connect to the OFX server, and ethereal will sniff it out.  Right? 
Wrong!  I'm a neophyte with a packet sniffer, but the capture file 
clearly indicates that the only IP addresses that I connected to during 
an online banking update were ones on my internal network and 
65.54.150.19 (msnmoney.com) port 443 (https).  In other words, my 
computer connects to msnmoney.com, msnmoney.com connects to the B of A 
OFX server, and my computer gets the data relayed from msmoney.com, NOT 
directly from the bank OFX server.  This is consistent with Money's 
insistence that my banking data live on their servers if I want to do 
OFX downloads.

The bottom line is, MS Money is useless for identifying an OFX server 
address, because it generates no direct traffic to an OFX server.

      ----Jon